A review on network partitioning in wireless sensor and actor networks

Wireless sensor and actor networks are used enormously in critical applications. Due to their clustered structure, where the actors are the cluster heads, failure of an actor disrupts the inter-actor communication and may lead to partition in the network. Network thus partitioned divides the sensing area into discrete segments, leaving coverage holes. Dimension of such coverage holes depends on the number of failed nodes and their position. Detection of such holes and their recovery is very crucial for a critical application and have thus attracted several researchers from the research community. This paper presents a survey of approaches to fault tolerance, detection and recovery techniques in WSAN. Survey is based on classification of approaches viz. proactive, reactive and hybrid.