E-NORS: A Repair Scheme for Energy-Efficient Network Organization in Wireless Sensor Networks

The unstable nature of wireless communication makes it hard to maintain a reliable network organization in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Therefore, network organization repair scheme is highly required for reliability. Because of the high energy efficiency requirement, the network organization repair scheme for WSNs differs from that for traditional networks. However, existing WSN network organization repair schemes are not energy efficient due to persistent listening, and may cause sensor nodes to fail to recover from network organization error situations. This paper proposes E-NORS, Energy-efficient Network Organization Repair Scheme, to overcome the high power consumption problem. E-NORS tries to restore the network organization on a duty cycle for energy conservation. A dynamic duty cycle adjustment mechanism is further presented in E-NORS to boost the repair speed in short time network organization error conditions. Evaluation results show that E-NORS can greatly prolong the lifetime of nodes in repairing the network organization, while maintaining a considerable repair speed.