Topology Control for Secured Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we present a new control method that makes some node adjustments in local areas in an effort to cover the "holes" in wireless sensor networks. Many security applications often face the problem of holes when some sensor nodes are disabled from the collaboration due to their failures and misbehavior. Affected by malicious attacks, these holes may occur dynamically and such a problem cannot be solved completely by simply deploying more redundant sensors. We propose a snake-like cascading replacement process in a local area in order to fill in the vacant area with trusted nodes. Only 1-hop neighborhood is used in our approach. Its implementations under both a passive model and an active model are discussed. The simulation results of our new control method show substantial improvements in total moving distance, total number of moves, and process converging speeds, compared with the best result known to date.