Combating routing holes by means of mobile nodes: Should energy really matter!?

In this paper, some fundamental aspects of self- healing in large-scale WSNs are discussed. Namely, by focusing on one particular type of holes - routing holes, the energy aspect of combating these holes through the deployment of a single mobile (super) node is examined. The obtained results indicate that, even though bridging a routing hole by means of a mobile node may seems very intuitive, the deployment of the mobile is often hard to formally justify. For instance, the use of the mobile turns out to be completely energy unjustifiable in all uniformly (e.g. circle- or square- like) shaped holes, regardless of their actual size or number of boundary nodes actively involved in routing. This further implies the need to consider other parameters, such as overall transmission delay or static- node failure, when deciding whether, or where ultimately, to deploy the mobile.