DKM: Distributed k-connectivity maintenance in Wireless Sensor Networks

The reliability of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is detrimentally impacted by unreliable wireless communication and the finite energy of sensor nodes. An advocated approach for assuring fault tolerant WSN is providing global k-connectivity. This property guarantees that the failure of up to k - 1 sensor nodes does not cause network partitioning. k-connectivity is a well studied property of WSN including the aspects of topology control, k-connected dominating set construction, controlled deployment, relay nodes placement, and detection of level of k-connectivity. In this work, we target the repair/maintenance aspect of k-connectivity. Our goal is to allow the network to provide localized, sustainable maintenance, which is capable of efficiently restoring/main-taining the WSN desired k-connect-ivity. We present a fully distributed technique that is competitively resource efficient to state-of-the-art approaches. Unlike existing techniques, our approach also provides the necessary efficient mechanisms to avoid network partitioning and the longer routing paths caused by node failures. We present both analysis and simulations to show the effectiveness and efficiency of our solution to maintain high responsiveness.