Recovery of Lost Connectivity in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks using Static Sensors as Bridge Routers

The actor nodes are the backbone of wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) in an unsupervised and hostile environment. Their failure rate is also high in hostile scenario due to many reasons like breakdown of electronic circuitry or complete battery power exhaustion of devices or software counter fault in nodes or physical damage of actor nodes, etc. The most serious side effect may occur in the network when connected network converts into multiple sub-networks due to permanent failure of cut-vertex backbone actor nodes in the network. This loss of connectivity among backbone actor nodes creates an adverse effect on the overall performance of the network. Therefore, the network partition problem in WSANs is most challenging issue in the real environment where we cannot control or reduce the failure of backbone cut-vertex actor nodes in the network. Recently, many approaches have been proposed to recover the lost connectivity among disjoint sub-networks using actors’ controlled mobility. However, it is also possible to rehabilitate the disconnected network by efficient use of high power sensor nodes as bridging routers without using actor's movement. In this paper, we propose a new energy efficient recovery approach based on two point crossover genetic algorithm (GA) to reconnect the partitioned network. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness of our proposed over state-of-the-art approaches.