Design and Evaluation of Algorithms for Energy Efficient and Complete Determination of Critical Nodes for Wireless Sensor Network Reliability

A critical node (cut vertex or articulation point) in wireless sensor networks, is a node which its failure breaks the connectivity of the network. Therefore, it is crucial that critical nodes be detected and treated with caution. This paper provides two localized distributed algorithms for determining the states of nodes (critical or noncritical). The first proposed algorithm identifies most of the critical and noncritical dominator nodes from two-hop local subgraph and connected dominating set (CDS) information that limits the computational complexity to O(Δ
²
) and bit complexity to O(clog
₂
n) where Δ is the maximum node degree, c is the critical node count, and n is the node count. The testbed experiments and simulation results show that this algorithm detects up to 93% of critical nodes and achieves up to 91% of state determination with low energy consumption. The second proposed algorithm, which is based on the first one, finds the states of all nodes by running a limited distributed depth-first search algorithm in unrecognized parts of the network without traversing the whole network. Comprehensive testbed experiments and simulation results reveal that, in the presence of a CDS, this algorithm finds all critical nodes with lower energy consumption than all existing algorithms.