A Failure Self-recovery Strategy with Balanced Energy Consumption for Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

In energy constrained wireless sensor networks, it is significant to make full use of the limited energy and maximize the network lifetime even when facing some unexpected situation. In this paper, all sensor nodes are grouped into clusters, and for each cluster, it has a mobile cluster head to manage the whole cluster. We consider an emergent situation that one of the mobile cluster heads is broken down, and hence the whole cluster is consequently out of work. An efficient approach is proposed for recovering the failure cluster by selecting multiple static sensor nodes as the cluster heads to collect packets and transmit them to the sink node. Improved simulated annealing algorithm is utilized to achieve the uniform deployment of the cluster heads. The new cluster heads are dynamically changed in order to keep balanced energy consumption. Among the new cluster heads, packets are transmitted through multi-hop forwarding path which is cost-lowest path found by Dijkstra’s algorithm. A balanced energy consumption model is provided to help find the cost-lowest path and prolong the lifetime of the network. The forwarding path is updated dynamically according to the cost of the path and residual energy of the node in that path. The experimental results show that the failure cluster is recovered and the lifetime of the cluster is prolonged.