Topological Hole Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks and its Applications
Stefan Funke
The identification of holes in a wireless sensor network
is of primary interest since the breakdown of sensor nodes
in a larger area often indicates one of the special events to
be monitored by the network in the first place (e.g. outbreak of a fire, destruction
by an earthquakes etc.). This task of identifying holes is
especially challenging since typical wireless sensor networks consist of lightweight, low-capability
nodes that are unaware of their geographic location.
But there is also a secondary interest in detecting holes in a network:
recently routing schemes have been proposed that do not
assume knowledge of the geographic location of the network nodes but
rather perform routing decisions based on the \emph{topology} of the
communication graph. Holes are salient features of the topology of a communication graph.
In the first part of this paper we propose a simple distributed procedure to identify
nodes near the boundary of the sensor field as well as near hole boundaries.
Our \emph{hole detection} algorithm is based purely on the
topology of the communication graph, i.e. the only information available
is which nodes can communicate with each other.
In the second part of this paper we illustrate
the secondary interest of our hole detection procedure using several examples.
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