A Case Study for Choosing Proper Relocation Algorithms to Recover Large Scale Coverage Hole(s) in Wireless Sensor Networks

Coverage holes as large scale en mass and correlated node failures in wireless sensor networks, not only disturb the normal operation and functionality of networks, but also may endanger network’s integrity. Recent trends to use relocation of currently deployed nodes have attracted attention especially where manual addition of nodes are neither feasible nor economical in many applications. The transition from centralized to distributed node relocation algorithm gradually paves away for applications in which nodes are deployed in harsh and hostile environments in absence of central supervision and control. Although, many different relocation algorithms have been devised to address their given applications’ challenges and requirements and they are efficient in reaching their design goals, they may not be similarly responsive to unpredicted and different circumstances may occur in the network. This paper, demonstrates one of such case, DSSA (Distributed Self-Spreading Algorithm) that is mainly applied for balancing node deployments and recovery of small coverage holes. It is shown here that DSSA is not able to fully recover large scale coverage holes even if all nodes participate in recovery process and relocate with sufficient number of iterations.