Optimal path planning for fault-tolerant and energy-efficient target surveillance in wireless sensor and actor networks

The Wireless Sensor and Actor Network (WSAN) is an extension of the wireless sensor network (WSN). Besides resource-limited sensor nodes, WSANs have resource-rich nodes, called actors, of higher capabilities to perform powerful actions. In this paper, we focus on target surveillance systems built atop WSANs to monitor critical targets. Since sensor nodes are usually equipped with limited energy sources and are likely to be influenced by unpredictable failures occurring in the harsh sensor field, we need to seriously take faulttolerance and energy-efficiency into consideration. Hence, we develop an optimal path planning (OPP) scheme to construct a maximum number of node-disjoint paths to deliver targets' event notification with minimum energy consumption. We also evaluate OPP performance by simulations and compare it with a related scheme to show its advantages.