Mobility-based internetworking of disjoint segments

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) deployed in inhospitable environments are at increased risk of failure due to malicious enemy action, environmental causes or component malfunction. Large scale failure can divide a network into disjoint segments and disrupt its operation. Reestablishing inter-segment connectivity is of paramount importance to ensure that the network functions effectively. Mobile nodes within surviving disjoint segments can be used to serve as mobile data collectors (MDCs) to tour individual segments and reconnect them by ferrying messages. However finding shortest tours for MDCs is a NP hard problem. In this paper we present a mobility based polynomial time approach for internetworking of disjoint segments (MINDS) by using k MDCs to establish tours between segments. MINDs aims to not only minimize total tour length but also balance the load equitably between the k MDCs. MINDS uses a divide and conquer approach to successively split the larger tour into two around a central node at every step, until we obtain k optimized tours. MINDS is validated through simulation and is shown outperform competing schemes in the literature.