Local Repair for Extending Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Networks

188 Abstract-The lifetime of battery operated wireless sensor networks can be prolonged by energy aware maintenance of the virtual backbone. The energy of a node is depleted quickly during communication and network failure is most likely to occur when the energy of a Minimum Connected Dominating Set (MCDS) node is exhausted. The reconstruction of an alternate backbone without the depleted node is both time and energy intensive. In the present study, local repair technique based on neighborhood information has been proposed and evaluated for extending lifetime. An energy depleted node is deleted and the backbone is repaired with other nodes to allow communication. It has been shown that the number of such extra nodes required for repairing the backbone is limited to five. Simulation results shows that the network lifetime extends significantly especially in large dense networks when the local repair is adopted as compared to networks without repair.