Detecting and connecting disjoint sub-networks in wireless sensor and actor networks

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) can be considered as a combination of a sensor network and an actor network in which powerful and mobile actor nodes can perform application specific actions based on the received data from the sensors. As most of these actions are performed collaboratively among the actors, inter-actor connectivity is one of the desirable features of WSANs. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed algorithm for establishing a connected inter-actor network topology. Considering initially disjoint sets of actors, our algorithm first initiates a search process by using the underlying sensor network in order to detect the possible sub-networks of actors in the region. After these sub-networks are detected, our algorithm pursues a coordinated actor movement in order to connect the sub-networks and thus achieve inter-actor connectivity for all the actors. This coordinated movement approach exploits the minimum connected dominating set of each sub-network when picking the appropriate actor to move so that the connectivity of each sub-network is not violated. In addition, the approach strives to minimize the total travel distance of actors and the messaging cost on both sensors and actors in order to extend the lifetime of WSAN. We analytically study the performance of our algorithm. Extensive simulation experiments validate the analytical results and confirm the effectiveness of our approach.