Fault Node Detection and Connectivity Restoration with Mobile Relay Node in Wireless Sensor Networks

In Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), node failure is an imperative concern in a hostile environment. These node failures create disjoints in the network and leads to a network partitioning problem. It is important for the nodes to be alive and communicate with each other to check the network connectivity. Replacement of Mobile Relay Nodes (MRN) in the location of faulty nodes is the best solutions to reestablish the network connectivity. In this paper, a diverse mechanism is proposed to restore the network connectivity, in the first approach the gateway node takes the responsibility of identifying the faulty node and corresponding communication is to be given to MRN. In the second approach, the residual energy of each node will play a major role in determining the faulty node. Further, performance analysis was performed using a hardware setup with Node MCU and Raspberry Pi3, which proves that this work is mainly suitable for resource constrained devices and provides better results in restoring network connectivity. The performance was validated using experimental analysis and better performance was achieved.