Efficient articulation point collaborative exploration for reliable communications in wireless sensor networks

Maintaining connectivity among nodes is one of the critical issues for reliable communications in wireless sensor networks. Unfortunately, the mobility and failure of nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have made this issue complicated and challenging. To prevent the network from partitioning, prior works focused on identifying articulation points (AP) in a WSN. However, these approaches either produce low AP identification accuracy or introduce expensive communications overhead. In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm, namely, APs collaborative exploration (ACE). The basic idea of ACE is for nodes to identify the loops by locally broadcasting the exploration packets. By examining the exploration packets, each node can efficiently and accurately identify if it is an AP without much communications overhead. Simulation results using both real and synthesized data sets illustrate that ACE not only achieves a high AP identification accuracy comparable with the state of the arts but only incurs a significant 50% lower communication overhead. Consequently, the proposed ACE is energy-efficient and saves up to 160% of energy compared with existing schemes.