Autonomous recovery from multi-node failure in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) often serve mission-critical applications in inhospitable environments such as battlefield and territorial borders. Inter-node communication is essential for WSNs to effectively fulfill their tasks. In hostile setups, the WSN may be subject to damage that breaks the network connectivity and disrupts the application. The network must be able to recover from the failure and restore connectivity so that the designated tasks can be carried out. Given the unattended operation of the network, the recovery should be performed autonomously. In this paper we present a distributed algorithm for Autonomous Repair (AuR) of damaged WSN topologies in the event of multiple node failures. AuR models connectivity between neighboring nodes as electrostatic interaction between charges based on Coulomb's law. The recovery process is initiated locally at the neighbors of failed nodes by moving in the direction of loss to reconnect with other nodes. The performance of AuR is validated through simulation.