Mobile Wireless Sensor Network Connectivity Repair with K-Redundanc

Connectivity is an important requirement for wireless sensor networks especially in real-time monitoring and data transfer applications. However, node movements and failures change the topology of the initial deployed network, which can result in partitioning of the communication graph. In this paper, we present a method for maintaining and repairing the communication network of a dynamic mobile wireless sensor network. We assume that we cannot control the motion of wireless sensor nodes, but there are robots whose motion can be controlled by the wireless sensor nodes to maintain and repair the connectivity of the network. At the heart of our method lies a novel graph property, k-redundancy, which is a measure of the importance of a node to the connectivity of a network. We first show that this property can be used to estimate repair time of a dynamic network. Then, we present a dynamic repair algorithm that minimizes expected repair time. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our method with extensive simulations and its feasibility with experiments on real robots and motes. Type of Report: Other Department of Computer Science & Engineering Washington University in St. Louis Campus Box 1045 St. Louis, MO 63130 ph: (314) 935-6160 Mobile Wireless Sensor Network Connectivity Repair with K-Redundancy Nuzhet Atay and Burchan Bayazit Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis, {atay,bayazit}@cse.wustl.edu Summary. Connectivity is an important requirement for wireless sensor networks especially in real-time monitoring and data transfer applications. However, node movements and failures change the topology of the initial deployed network, which can result in partitioning of the communication graph. In this paper, we present a method for maintaining and repairing the communication network of a dynamic mobile wireless sensor network. We assume that we cannot control the motion of wireless sensor nodes, but there are robots whose motion can be controlled by the wireless sensor nodes to maintain and repair the connectivity of the network. At the heart of our method lies a novel graph property, k-redundancy, which is a measure of the importance of a node to the connectivity of a network. We first show that this property can be used to estimate repair time of a dynamic network. Then, we present a dynamic repair algorithm that minimizes expected repair time. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our method with extensive simulations and its feasibility with experiments on real robots and motes.