A cost-effective scheme for restoring connectivity of disconnected WSNs

Many works on restoring WSN connectivity pursue complete recovery of the original connectivity. Doing so would inevitably incur high time complexity and large number of restoration nodes. However, for many applications, 100% recovery of the original connectivity is not necessary. We propose a scheme for deploying restoration sensors for a disconnected WSN to reconnect the network, achieving remarkable restored connectivity while keeping the number of restoration nodes at a low level. Since an accurate, optimal solution to the problem is NP-hard, we resort to tackling the problem in a greedy and heuristic manner. Analysis and performance evaluation via simulation show that the proposed scheme can restore the network´s connectivity to a very good level with relatively low cost in terms of algorithm time and restoration nodes needed.