Fast Restoration of Connectivity for Wireless Sensor Networks

Node failures represent a fundamental problem in wireless sensor networks. Such failures may result in partitioned networks and lose of sensed information. A network recovery approach is thus necessary in order to ensure continuous network operations. In this paper, we propose CoMN2 a scalable and distributed approach for network recovery from node failures in wireless sensor networks. CoMN2 relies on a new concept called network mapping which consists in partitioning the network into several regions of increasing criticality. The criticality is set according to the energy, the traffic distribution and the deployment of nodes. Using this network mapping, our solution CoMN2 ensures the continuous network activity by efficiently swapping nodes from low critical area to highly critical area when required. Simulation results prove the effectiveness of our approach and show that the obtained improvement in terms of lifetime is in the order of 40%.