Efficient Actor Recovery Paradigm for Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

The actor nodes are the spine of wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) that collaborate to perform a specific task in an unverified and uneven environment. Thus, there is a possibility of high failure rate in such unfriendly scenarios due to several factors such as power consumption of devices, electronic circuit failure, software errors in nodes or physical impairment of the actor nodes and inter-actor connectivity problem. Therefore, it is extremely important to discover the failure of a cut-vertex actor and network-disjoint in order to improve the Quality-of-Service (QoS). In this paper, we propose an Efficient Actor Recovery (EAR) paradigm to guarantee the contention-free traffic-forwarding capacity. The EAR paradigm consists of a Node Monitoring and Critical Node Detection (NMCND) algorithm that monitors the activities of the nodes to determine the critical node. In addition, it replaces the critical node with backup node prior to complete node-failure which helps balancing the network performance. The packets are handled using Network Integration and Message Forwarding (NIMF) algorithm that determines the source of forwarding the packets; either from actor or sensor. This decision-making capability of the algorithm controls the packet forwarding rate to maintain the network for a longer time. Furthermore, for handling the proper routing strategy, Priority-Based Routing for Node Failure Avoidance (PRNFA) algorithm is deployed to decide the priority of the packets to be forwarded based on the significance of information available in the packet. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed EAR paradigm, the proposed algorithms were tested using OMNET++ simulation.