A distributed recovery mechanism for actor-actor connectivity in wireless sensor actor networks

Wireless sensor actor networks (WSANs) consist of a number of sensor nodes and actor nodes in a distributed network. Sensor nodes collect data from environment and report them to actor nodes or to a sink node. Actor nodes coordinate to take decisions and accordingly take suitable actions. To coordinate, actor nodes must communicate with each other through their network connections. Therefore, actor-actor connectivity is vital to coordination. A node failure may lead to network partitioning. This paper proposes a distributed mechanism for recovering the connectivity failures among actors in their partitioned network. Sensor nodes are used to temporarily and rapidly re-establish actor-actor connectivity long before this connectivity is permanently re-established through movements of some actors. It is shown that the proposed mechanism increases the availability of connectivity while the actorspsila connectivity undergoes repair by actor movement. Simulation results also show a comparatively lower time to repair for our approach.