A Survey of Connectivity Restoration Problem in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) are among the most addressed research fields in the area of computer science in recent years. WSANs are composed of possibly a large number of tiny, autonomous sensor devices and resource rich actors equipped with wireless communication and computation capabilities. In WSANs, actors collect sensor information and respond collaboratively to achieve an application mission. Since actors coordinate their operation, a strongl y connected inter actor network would be required at all time. Actors may fail for many reasons and the failure may cause the network to partition into disjoint blocks. This may influence the usefulness and effectiveness of the network. So, having a partitioning detection and connectivity restoration procedure is mandatory. In this survey paper, we provide an overall view of the studies in this area by summarizing previous achievements.