On the Minimum k-Connectivity Repair in Wireless Sensor Networks

Repairing connectivity and achieving a certain level of fault tolerance are two important research challenges in wireless sensor networks that have, in many papers in the literature, been jointly studied. Most of the proposals that aim at restoring network connectivity deal with the network as a general graph of N nodes with the edge cost being the number of nodes needed to establish connectivity between the two ends of the edge. This assumption ignores the topological properties of the network, especially the overlap between sensors' communication ranges, and the node-failure pattern that caused the disconnection. In this paper, we try to exploit these properties to minimize the number of additional nodes needed to repair the connectivity.