Coverage Hole Bypassing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks deployment and operation are most likely to take place under hazardous conditions. One extreme scenario is the deployment of a wireless sensor network in a mountainous and forested region in which a fire has ignited, for the purpose of localizing and/or tracking, in real time, its spread. Some methods developed in this paper are expected to provide superior performances under these conditions. Existing fires in the deployment region will also affect the nodes' coverage because the nodes that will fall in the middle of the fire will likely cease to operate. In our work, we develop a coverage hole bypassing algorithm for storing and maintaining holes-information in the network based on which a boundary node can provide the communication path which is more efficient to try to bypass a hole. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the proposed method and evaluate its run-time and message count per node. We show that these routing can be used in many applications.