Growing Fully Distributed Robust Topologies in a Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are at the forefront of emerging technologies due to the recent advances in Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology. WSN are considered to be unattended systems with applications ranging from environmental sensing, structural monitoring, and industrial process control to emergency response and mobile target tracking.The distributed nature and the limited hardware capabilities of WSN challenge the development of effective applications. The strength of a sensor network, which turns out to be also its weakness, is the capability to perform inter-node processing while sharing data across the network. However, the limited reliability of a node, due to the low-cost nature of the hardware components, drastically constrains this aspect. For this reason, the availability of a mechanism to build distributed robust connectivity topologies, where robustness is meant against random failures of nodes and intentional attacks of nodes, is crucial. The complex network theory along with the percolation theory provides a suitable framework to achieve that. Indeed, topologies such as multi-modal and scale free ones, show interesting properties which might be embedded into a sensor network to significantly increase its robustness. In this work, a mechanisms to build robust topologies in a distributed fashion is proposed, its effectiveness is analytically investigated and results are validated through simulations.