Fault-Tolerance Considerations for Wireless Sensor Networks

The management of fault-tolerance in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has its own unique technical challenges as well. Most of the previous solutions in this area either support only continuous data delivery model or operate in MAC and network layers. They also impose unnecessary overheads and have simplified assumptions. There are few solutions in the middleware layer of WSNs which consider dependability parameters like fault-tolerance and real-time. This paper proposes a new fault-tolerant approach in the middleware layer of WSNs that can detect faults and recover nodes in event-driven WSNs. Fault detection and recovery in WSNs are improved by additional nodes in a cluster-based structure. Simulation results show a higher degree of nodes recovery in the proposed approach with respect to existing approaches.

Keywords:

Wireless Sensor Networks , Fault- Tolerance , Recovery , Event-Driven , Middleware