Network Connectivity Recovering Using Cooperative Links in Wireless Networks

In Wireless Ad Hoc Networks, articulation nodes are critical nodes that connect two (or more) network components. Owing to their relevance, ways to extend the lifetime of articulation nodes have been considered in the literature. In general, such techniques aim to allow articulation nodes to save battery power. However, in case of articulation node failure, ways to reestablish the communication, even if for short periods of time, can be of great interest in adversity situations. This work explores the concept of Cooperative Communication (CC) to recover network connectivity in the event of articulation node failure. Unlike other works that perform exhaustive search to locate suitable CC-links and require global topology information, the proposed scheme performs all its operations using local information. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is able to reestablish communication among network components with a much lower computational and message control cost when compared with other similar proposals that need global network topological information.