Abstract
This study investigates the performance analysis of mobile unattended wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) during the self-healing process under informed movement inside a cluster of healed and sick sensors. Introducing mobility within a cluster can increase the chance that a sick sensor has healthy neighbours and this will aid the sick sensor to be healed faster and better. However, sensor mobility is considered as one of the most energy consuming factors in UWSNs. This study proposes a new self-healing scheme based on a single flow controlled mobility within a cluster to make a trade-off between self-healing and energy consumption in mobile UWSNs. The obtained results show that using the proposed scheme, UWSNs can exploit controlled sensor mobility to enhance network capability in terms of self-healing and reduce the communication-related energy consumption. In addition, the proposed scheme with single flow controlled mobility does not disturb the number of neighbours per sensor and the network coverage.