Increasing Connectivity in Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks Using Dynamic Actuator Cooperation

Distributed systems based on networked sensors and actuators with embedded computation capabilities are commonly used to monitor and control the physical world. To provide a meaningful service such as disaster and emergency surveillance, meeting real-time-and-energy constraints and the stability of transmit queues are the basic requirements of communication protocols in such networks. In settings with sparse distribution of actuator nodes, multi-hop routing is traditionally used to relay information to a remote sink. A problem with this approach is that the loss of connectivity of actuator nodes may lead to partitioning of the network.