Network Partitioning Recovery Mechanisms in WSANs: a Survey

Abstract

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) are more promising and most addressing research field in the area of wireless sensor networks in recent scenario. It composed of possibly a large number of tiny, autonomous sensor devices and resources rich actor nodes equipped with wireless communication and computation capabilities. Actors collect sensors' information and respond collaboratively to achieve an application specific mission. Since actors have to coordinate their operation, a strongly connected inter-actor network would be required at all the time in the network. Actor nodes may fail for many reasons (i.e. due of battery exhaustion or hardware failure due to hash environment etc.) and failures may convert connected network into disjoint networks. This can hinder sometimes not only the performance of network but also degrade the usefulness and effectiveness of the network. Thus, having a partitioning detection and connectivity restoration procedure at the time of failure occurs in the network is crucial for WSANs. In this paper, we review the present network partitioning recovery approaches and provide an overall view of this study by summarizing previous achievements.