Distributed approach for mitigating coverage loss in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

In a heterogeneous wireless sensor network, nodes with different sensing capabilities are dispersed throughout an area of interest. Nodes with similar capabilities are not necessarily collocated. When a node fails, the area in the vicinity of such a node is left uncovered and the application may be negatively impacted. In this paper, we present a distributed algorithm for mitigating the coverage loss caused by the failure of a sensor node. The proposed algorithm looks for one or multiple nodes that can be repositioned in order to fill the coverage gap. A search is conducted within the 2-hop neighborhood to identify a node or a combination of multiple nodes that collectively possess the capabilities of the failed node. In order to maximize the performance of the network, the repositioned nodes are chosen such that there is a minimum coverage and connectivity impact on the network after the recovery. In addition, the distance a node will travel to replace the failed node is also taken into consideration to limit the recovery overhead. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated through simulation.