Adaptive healing procedure for lifetime improvement in Wireless Sensor Networks

Most of Wireless Sensor Networks are deployed to monitor a set of targets over a specified area. The lifetime of such a network is defined as the time duration from the network deployment till the time when one target is no longer covered. Thus, this lifetime is limited by the energy resource of sensor nodes. In order to maximize the lifetime of the network, only a subset of nodes capable of covering all targets are activated at a time while the others are put in sleep mode to save their energy. When an active sensor fails, a recovery procedure should be executed to keep all targets covered. In this paper we propose a new self-healing method for network reconfiguration in case of failure of an active node. Simulation results show that this method increases the network dependability by reducing the network unavailability time up to 90 % % compared to the dynamic maintenance for networks with more than 200 sensor nodes of sensing range equals to 10, uniformly deployed over a 50 × 50 square to cover 50 targets also uniformly deployed over the same area.