An Effective and Scalable Connectivity Restoration Heuristic for Mobile Sensor/Actor Networks

Due to inhospitable environments, the actors/sensors in Mobile Sensor/Actor Networks are subject to various damages which can disrupt the data delivery and cooperation. Typically, the damages affect the existing routes and may even cause network partitioning. In such a case, the set of actors/sensors disconnected from the rest of the network, namely a partition, can be re-connected with the network through topology adjustment by exploiting node mobility. However, movement of the nodes consumes significant energy which needs to be minimized. In this paper, the authors propose an effective yet scalable heuristic approach for restoring network connectivity while minimizing the total movement distance of the nodes.