CoRFL: A Connectivity Restoration Mechanism Using Fuzzy Logic in Wireless Actor and Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) deployed in a harsh environment may suffer simultaneous failures causing the network to be partitioned into disjointed parts. Connectivity restoration of these partitions is a vital issue for the reliability of the network mission. Most of the existing works in the literature mainly focus on restoring network connectivity take into account number of moving nodes, travelled distance, but not WSANs lifetime. In this paper, a distributed node-repositioning algorithm based on fuzzy logic (CoRFL) is proposed to reduce broadcasting messages due to network failure detection, restore network connectivity and to increase the network lifetime. In CoRFL, we parametrize the selection of recovery team according to fuzzy logic rules. Extensive simulation experiments have been conducted. The simulation results demonstrate outstanding performance compared to traditional approaches in terms of reestablishing the connectivity and increasing the lifetime of WSANs.