2010 IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Embedded and Ubiquitous Computing
Partitioning Detection and Connectivity Restoration Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Actor Networks Muhammad Imran1, Mohamed Younis2, Abas Md Said1, Halabi Hasbullah1 1
Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Malaysia, cmimran81@yahoo.com 2 Dept. of Computer Science & Electrical Eng., University of Maryland Baltimore County, USA, younis@umbc.edu
Abstract- Recently, Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks have been receiving a growing attention from the research community because of their suitability for critical applications. Maintaining inter-actor connectivity becomes extremely crucial in such situations where actors have to quickly plan optimal coordinated response to detected events. Failure of critical actor partitions the inter-actor network into disjoint segments, and thus hinders the network operation. Autonomous detection and rapid recovery procedures are highly desirable in such case. This paper presents PCR, a novel distributed partitioning detection and connectivity restoration algorithm. PCR proactively identifies critical actors based on local topological information and designate appropriate backup nodes (preferably noncritical) to handle their failure. A backup actor detects the failure and initiates a recovery process that may involve coordinated multi-actor relocation. The purpose is to avoid procrastination, localize the scope of recovery process and minimize the movement overhead. Simulation results validate the performance of PCR that outperforms contemporary schemes found in literature.
Figure 1: An example Wireless Sensor and Actor Network setup.
The harsh application environments make actors susceptible to physical damage and component malfunction. Failure of a critical actor, i.e., a cut-vertex node, may partition the interactor network into disjoint segments. Consequently, an interactor interaction may cease and the network becomes incapable of delivering a timely response to a serious event. Therefore, recovery from an actor failure is of utmost importance. Since WSANs operates autonomously in unattended setups, replacing the failed actor is often infeasible and the recovery should be a self-healing and agile process that involves reconfiguring the inter-actor topology. The criticality of the applications and the resource constrained nature of networks necessitate for low restoration time and reduced overhead. Most of the existing approaches in the literature are purely reactive [3, 13, 14], with the recovery process initiated once the failure of “F” is detected. The main idea is replace the failed node “F” with one of its neighbors or move those neighbors inward to autonomously mend severed topology in the vicinity of F. Usually the repositioning of the neighbors of F causes more links to break and the relocation process repeats in a cascaded manner. Since these reactive schemes require coordination among the healthy nodes, the recovery process often imposes high messaging overhead. In addition, these approaches only focus on resource efficiency and do not consider recovery time. In this paper, we present a novel distributed Partition detection and Connectivity Restoration (PCR) algorithm which proactively determine potential critical actors and rapidly repair the topology with little overhead. The design philosophy of PCR is based on “Guardian nomination” inspired from social and legal systems. First each actor proactively assesses its criticality, i.e., being a cut-vertex in the network topology, in a distributed manner based on the local information. Each critical (primary) actor designates appropriate neighbor
Keywords: Wireless sensor and actor network, Fault tolerance, Connectivity restoration, Actor relocation.
I.
INTRODUCTION
Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) are gaining growing interest because of their suitability for mission critical applications that require autonomous and intelligent interaction with the environment. Example of these applications include forest fire monitoring, disaster management, search and rescue, homeland security, battlefield reconnaissance, oil and gas pipeline monitoring, space exploration, etc. WSANs employ number of sensor nodes that report an event of interest to one or multiple actors [1]. The concerned actors respond to events such as fire, earthquakes, disasters etc. The role of an actor is extremely crucial for a timely response to this type of events in order to prevent serious consequences. A sample WSAN environment is depicted in Figure 1. In these critical WSAN applications, actors need to collaborate and coordinate with each other on an optimal response and synchronize their operations. For example, in a forest monitoring applications, sensors are deployed to detect fires and report it to actors in the vicinity. Actors such as fire extinguishing robots and flying aircrafts need to be engaged as rapidly as possible in order to control the erupted fire and prevent it from spreading. Therefore, actors should collaboratively identify the most appropriate set of actors that will participate in the operation. This requires that actors should be able to communicate with each other. Therefore, actors establish and maintain inter-actor topology in order to enable such communication. 978-0-7695-4322-2/10 $26.00 © 2010 IEEE DOI 10.1109/EUC.2010.37
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