A comprehensive fault-tolerant framework for wireless sensor networks

In the last decade, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have increasingly gained the attention of researchers. Depending on the applications of WSNs, the sensor nodes are usually dispersed in harsh environments, which are prone to different types of faults. Hence, fault tolerance seems as an essential characteristic that should be considered in the architecture level of these networks. On the other hand, WSNs are battery-powered so that there is a trade-off between preserving the energy and meeting the quality of service requirements of the network. In this paper, we target these challenges through proposing a fault-tolerant scheme (FTS) for clustered sensor networks. First, all the nodes are grouped into some clusters, and then the FTS alongside the main operation of the network, that is, data acquisition, is performed by the cluster heads. The main idea of the FTS is to efficiently use different kinds of the redundancy, including the hardware, time, and space. We validate the FTS through simulation and probabilistic analysis. While the reliability is significantly improved, we show that a clustered WSN consumes about 5-19% more energy in order to perform the FTS. Copyright (c) 2015John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.