A coverage restoration scheme for wireless sensor networks within Simulated Annealing

This paper presents a simple but an effective approach to restore the coverage within a wireless sensor network (WSN) when sensors fail without adding new sensors. We have considered a sensor node failure due to electrical faults or malfunctions during the initial deployment. Each sensor has a limited energy supply, and the failure of a sensor results in extra overhead during restoration of the uncovered regions of the failed sensors on the active sensors. Therefore, we have proposed a restoration problem, which is to find the nearest and most apt neighbor in order to cover the uncovered region and at the same time maintain the lifespan of WSN to an accepted level. We have developed a restoration scheme within an optimization search algorithm, Simulated Annealing- a generic probabilistic metaheuristic algorithm. Our scheme searches the neighborhood space of the failing sensors in west-first counterclockwise. Our algorithm analyzes all the categories of failed nodes and the computational results show that our algorithm assists to increase the coverage area of the failing sensors with optimized energy consumption.