SINKPATH: A COOPERATIVE COMMUNICATION PROTOCOL TO RESTABLISH WSN CONNECTIVITY.

Nodes in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are expected to cooperate with each other in the task of transferring data to the sink. As battery depletion and node failure are commonplace in WSNs, ways to prolong and enhance network connectivity have been investigated. However, the proposed solutions are usually computational expensive or assume that additional nodes can be inserted or moved to a specific location as needed. This paper presents SinkPath, a lightweight, distributed mechanism that attempts to restore network connectivity in the event of network partitioning. To achieve this, localized information on cut-vertices and cut-edges are used to create cooperative, backup, links that are used to prevent network segmentation. At its core, SinkPath uses a simple, yet effective heuristic to select helper nodes that participate in the task of forming low-power, cooperative links. Simulation results show that SinkPath is able to produce low-power CC-links while being able to reestablish network connectivity in more than 99.5% of the simulated scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]