Improving Connectivity of Nodes in Mobile WSN

How to measure and maintain connectivity is an important issue in ad hoc networks. A special case of such network is Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), which are often deployed in harsh environments and also susceptible to a number of problems that may negatively affect the connectivity among the nodes. An additional factor that increases the cost of connectivity maintenance in ad hoc networks is when the nodes can move. When it comes to the WSN domain, this aspect is still more problematic, as the often small sensor nodes have in general a limited energy budget, and then should not use too much energy in the management of their connectivity. The goal of this work is to choose a topology for mobile WSN and improve the network connectivity as a whole while considering and influencing the energy consumption among all the nodes in the network. Different network topologies are considered and discussed. After evaluation of the pros and cons of the estimation quality when applied to each studied topology, a clustered hierarchical algorithm was chosen for network deployment. By means of a link estimator and considering different variables, a metric have been defined to estimate the link reliability. As a result, improved network connectivity is reported.