Region-Different Network Reconfiguration in Disjoint Wireless Sensor Networks for Smart Agriculture Monitoring

Connectivity restoration is essential for ensuring continuous operation in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). However, existing works lack enough network robustness when suffering from the secondary external damages. In this article, we propose a novel connectivity restoration scheme to address this problem. This scheme comprises three connectivity mechanisms regarding relay segment selection in different regions. The first one is a data traffic decentralization mechanism, which establishes more transmission paths near the sink for reliability improvement and traffic load balancing. The second one is a segment shape selection mechanism, in which the segments with high-reliability preferably become the relay segments for greater network robustness. The third one is a traffic load transfer mechanism, in which data traffic is transferred from a high-load segment to a low-load segment for balancing energy depletion of the network. The distinctive characteristics of this work are twofold: different regions perform diverse connectivity restoration approaches according to the demand diversity of different regions, and traffic load can be balanced from upstream regions rather than only from downstream regions. Extensive simulation experiments validate the effectiveness and advantages of our proposed scheme in terms of connection cost, network robustness, load balance degree, and network longevity.