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 NP-Hard. In this paper we study the problem under constrained number of MDCs which makes the problem more challenging. We present a polynomial time heuristic for Interconnecting Disjoint Segments with k MDCs (IDM-kMDC). IDM-kMDC opts to minimize the tour lengths and balance the load on the k available MDCs. We model each segment by a representative. The IDM-kMDC heuristic finds k-subsets of representatives, computes an optimized tour for each subset and assigns one MDC for each tour. The performance of the algorithm is validated through simulation.