Delay-Conscious Federation of Multiple Wireless Sensor Network Segments Using Mobile Relays

Nodes in wireless sensor networks continuously monitor their surroundings and report to the base station if there is any anomaly. WSN in extreme environmental conditions can suffer from a large scale failure where multiple nodes fail simultaneously and the network gets partitioned into disjoint segments. In addition, in some application multiple standalone WSNs need to be federated to collectively handle an emerging event that requires data sharing among these networks. Numerous approaches have been proposed in the literature to establish connectivity among these network segments by deploying stationary relay nodes (RN) to form data path. In scenarios where the available resources are limited, one or very few mobile data collectors (MDCs) can be used to create intermittent links among the disjoint segments. In this paper, we investigate a federation problem in scenarios where the number of available MDCs is less than the number of RNs required and more than the number of network segments. We present an algorithm to find an optimized travel routes for the MDCs so that the average delay of the network is minimized. The performance of the algorithm is validated through simulation.