An adaptive mechanism for improving resiliency in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are mainly deployed in harsh environmental conditions where sensors are susceptible to failure. Most serious consequences occur when network gets partitioned into disjoint sub-networks which severely degrades network performance. Maintaining Quality of Service (QoS) and connectivity at the time of node failures is termed as network resiliency. To increase network resiliency this paper proposes a proactive mechanism to switch parent node in order to avoid possible network disconnection. To maintain connectivity in the network and to accommodate newly formed links, proposed proactive routing mechanism uses radio range adjustment of sensor nodes. OPNET Modeler is used to model the deployment scenario and the proposed resiliency mechanism is tested to investigate the impact on delay and packet drops. Simulation results show that proposed mechanism prevents possible network partitioning in case of node failures and results 5.5% less end to end delay and 40% less packet drops.