Recovery from simultaneous failures in a large scale wireless sensor network

The Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) become more and more recognized these recent years and their applications spread in several domains. In general, these applications require that the network presents a minimum degree of reliability, effectiveness and robustness. However, the specificity of the nodes used in this type of networks makes them prone to failures. Indeed, the multichannel communications are generally privileged in the interference context which is very frequent in several WSNs' applications due to the density of sensors and the harsh environment in which they are deployed. Moreover, in real applications, the occurrence of some faults (for example fire) may alter an entire zone of the network especially in the case of large scale deployment. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a network fault recovery approach from simultaneous failures in a large scale multichannel WSN. To make our solution as realistic as possible, we consider the case of the precision agriculture application and propose a detailed deployment of the WSN for that application. The choice of precision agriculture application is motivated by the fact that this application require large scale WSN (thousands and thousands of sensors) to supervise such a large area: Based on such precision agriculture scenario, we propose our fault recovery approach, called Simultaneous Failure Recovery based on Relay Node Relocation (SFR-RNR), that aims to restore the connectivity and partially the coverage in the network. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated by simulation. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.