T. Truong, K. Brown, C.J. Sreenan.
Autonomous Discovery and Repair of Damage in Wireless Sensor Networks.
Proc. of 38th Annual IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN),
Oct. 2013.
Wireless Sensor Networks in volatile environments may suffer damage, and connectivity must be restored. The repairing agent must discover surviving nodes and damage to
the physical and radio environment as it moves around the
sensor field to execute the repair. We compare two approaches,
one which re-generates a full plan whenever it discovers new
knowledge, and a second which attempts to minimise the required
number of new radio nodes. We apply each approach with two
different heuristics, one which attempts to minimise the cost of
new radio nodes, and one which aims to minimise the travel
distance. We conduct extensive simulation-based experiments,
varying key parameters, including the level of damage suffered,
and comparing directly with the published state-of-the-art. We
quantify the relative performance of the different algorithms in
achieving their objectives, and also measure the execution times
to assess the impact on being able to make autonomous decisions
in reasonable time.