Distributed Recovery of Actor Failures in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) additionally employ actor nodes within the wireless sensor network (WSN) which can process the sensed data and perform certain actions based on this collected data. In most applications, inter-actor coordination is required to provide the best response. This suggests that the employed actors should form and maintain a connected inter-actor network at all times. However, WSANs often operate unattended in harsh environments where actors can easily fail or get damaged. Such failures can partition the inter-actor network and thus eventually make the network useless. In order to handle such failures, we present a connected dominating set (CDS) based partition detection and recovery algorithm. The idea is to identify whether the failure of a node causes partitioning or not in advance. If a partitioning is to occur, the algorithm designates one of the neighboring nodes to initiate the connectivity restoration process. This process involves repositioning of a set of actors in order to restore the connectivity. The overall goal in this restoration process is to localize the scope of the recovery and minimize the movement overhead imposed on the involved actors. The effectiveness of the approach is validated through simulation experiments.