Inter-actor Connectivity Restoration in Wireless Sensor Actor Networks: An Overview

Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) consist of powerful actors and resource constraint sensors linked by wireless medium. In WSANs, the sensors gather information about the physical environment while the actors take decisions and perform appropriate actions depending on the sensed data. In some applications, actors must communicate with each other to make appropriate decisions and perform the coordinated actions. Maintaining interactor connectivity is extremely important in critical WSAN applications, where the actors need to quickly plan for optimal coordinated response to events detected by the sensors. The failure of a critical actor partitions the inter-actor network into disjoint segments and hinders the network operation. Under such circumstances, the network no longer becomes capable of giving a timely response to a serious event. So, recovery from an inter-actor connectivity failure is of utmost importance. This paper reviews different approaches for restoring the inter-actor connectivity in WSANs.