An Event-Driven Self-Healing Routing and Topology Maintenance Mechanism for Surface-Deployed Wireless Sensor Networks in Ocean Environments

Surface-deployed wireless sensor networks (WSNs) provide a flexible platform for ocean monitoring, but ocean-current-dominant marine forcing causes persistent topology evolution, backbone distortion, and route breakage. This paper proposes an event-driven self-healing routing and topology-maintenance mechanism for drift-prone surface WSNs. The design combines dual-threshold cluster-head handover, CH-HELP backbone repair, Node-HELP member reattachment, loop-free upstream reselection, and conditional global reclustering as a low-frequency corrective layer for long-term topology degradation. Unlike fixed-round reorganization, the proposed framework prioritizes local repair and triggers global refresh only when backbone quality persistently deteriorates. Simulations driven by Taiwan Strait current-dominant flow–wind data show that the full Proposed-Hybrid method reduces the CH-disconnection rate from 8.15% in DARCR to 5.15%, whereas the local-only configuration without conditional global reclustering yields 9.13%. Conditional global reclustering further suppresses late-stage topology degradation, reducing the final-third mean CH-disconnection rate from 16.32% to 8.51% and the late-stage 95th-percentile peak from 34.43% to 17.21%. DARCR remains competitive in some late-stage metrics because of its fixed-period global reorganization.