A hierarchical structure based coverage repair in wireless sensor networks

In this paper, we propose a new control method to cover ldquoholesrdquo in wireless sensor networks. Many applications often face the problem of holes when some sensor nodes are disabled from the collaboration due to their failures and misbehavior. These holes may occur dynamically, and such a problem cannot be solved completely by simply deploying more redundant sensors. With synchronization around each hole based on a hierarchical structure, one (and only one) snake-like cascading repair process will be initiated in the local area in order to fill in that vacant space with a spare node. In this way, network connectivity and coverage can be guaranteed. The analytical and experimental results show substantial improvements of our approach compared with the best result known to date.