Optimized Interconnection of Disjoint Wireless Sensor Network Segments Using K Mobile Data Collectors

Due to harsh environmental conditions a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) may suffer from large scale damage where many nodes fail simultaneously and thus the network gets partitioned into several disjoint network segments. Restoring intersegment connectivity is essential to avoid negative effects on the application. Employing Mobile Data Collectors (MDCs), which - by repositioning - facilitate the establishment of communication links between segments, may provide flexible solution to this problem. However the problem of finding shortest tours for MDCs is NPHard. In this paper, the authors study the problem under constrained number of MDCs which makes the problem more challenging.