Extraction of disjoint paths in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks with mobile supernodes to enhance fault tolerance

Heterogeneous wireless sensor networks with mobile supernodes consist of n sensors and m mobile supernodes. Disjoint paths are used in these networks to enhance fault tolerance, improve the network lifetime, and implement an effective load distribution. The network topology is disrupted because disjoint paths disappear when a supernode changes its location to improve the network lifetime and avoid the death of adjacent nodes. This paper proposes a distributed method for finding disjoint paths from ordinary sensors to mobile supernodes when supernodes move to new locations. The proposed algorithm will have a message complexity of O(n2Δ) and an execution time of O(n2Δ2), in which n denotes the number of nodes, and Δ indicates the highest node degree. According to evaluation results, mobile supernodes led to a 96% longer lifetime than static supernodes, and the network fault tolerance with mobile supernodes was 7.1 times higher than the fault tolerance with static supernodes.