Distributed Connectivity Restoration for Mobile Sensor Systems With Limited Information

The use of mobility factor in wireless distributed sensing, mobile sensor systems (MSS), vital in many practical application scenarios can offer distinct advantages over their fixed counterparts. The topological connectivity of the sensor nodes is built upon dynamic ad hoc networks comes with limited information, which requires special care and measures. Any loss of this information especially for those working in extreme environments becomes critical as any failures in one or more sensors could escalate the loss of connectivity leading to possible breakdowns. In order to address this problem, we propose a hybrid connectivity restoration framework (HERO) that makes use of a structured partitioning at topological level and restores the network connectivity upon a functional motion controller. HERO, designed so that while maintaining the trace of connected components, it also: 1) reduces the overall movement distances when restoring the connectivity; 2) eliminates the chance of intersensor collisions; and 3) ensures restorability of the MSS upon the limited available information. The correctness and efficiency of HERO are validated via extensive simulation studies and comparisons. Furthermore, to evaluate HERO in practical working environment, we have conducted several experiments using our small-scale prototype MSS testbed.