A Novel Energy-Aware Fault Tolerance Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Sensors in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are prone to failure, due to energy depletion, hardware failures, etc. Fault tolerance is one of the critical issues in WSNs. The existing fault tolerant mechanisms either consume significant extra energy to detect and recover from the failures or need to use additional hardware and software resource. In this paper, we propose a novel energy-aware fault tolerance mechanism for WSN, called Informer Homed Routing (IHR). In our IHR, the non cluster head nodes limit and select the target of their data transmission. Therefore, it consumes less energy. Our experiments show that our proposed protocol can dramatically reduce energy consumption, compared to two existing protocols, LEACH and DHR.