An Efficient Mechanism for Establishing Connectivity in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) employ powerful and mobile actor nodes that can perform application specific actions based on the received data from the sensors. As most of these actions are performed collaboratively among the actors, inter-actor connectivity is one of the desirable features of WSANs. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed algorithm for establishing a connected inter-actor network topology. Considering an initially partitioned actor network with intra-connected sub-networks, our algorithm pursues a coordinated actor movement in order to connect the sub-networks. The goal of this movement is to both minimize the total and maximum travel distances of the individual actors. Our algorithm considers the minimum connected dominating set of each sub-network when picking the appropriate actor to move so that the connectivity of each sub-network is not violated. We analytically study the performance of our algorithm. Extensive simulation experiments validate the analytical results and confirm the effectiveness of our approach.