A Novel Fault Tolerant Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks

Failure of cluster heads in cluster-based wireless sensor networks is catastrophic since this type of nodes is responsible for collecting and aggregating data sensed by sensor nodes in order to send it to the sink node. Therefore, fault tolerance of cluster heads is an important issue in this type of networks. The existing fault tolerant mechanisms either consume considerably extra energy and time or require the use of supplementary material and software resources to detect and recover failures. In this paper, we propose a novel fault tolerant mechanism which deals with permanent and transient failures more efficiently. The performance of the proposed mechanism was tested by means of simulations and compared against the low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy and informer homed routing protocols. Simulation results showed that our mechanism has better performance than these protocols in terms of energy and time costs needed to tolerate failures as well as the amount of data that reaches the sink.