Fault Tolerance Model for Efficient Actor Recovery Paradigm in WSAN

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSAN) is an area where sensors and actors collaborate to sense, handle and perform tasks in real-time. Thus, reliability is an important factor. Due to the natural of WSAN, actor nodes are open to failure. Failure of actor nodes degrades the network performance and may lead to network disjoint. Thus, fault tolerance techniques should be applied to insure the efficiency of the network. In an earlier work, the authors proposed an efficient actor recovery paradigm (EAR) for WSAN which handles the critical actor node failure and recovery while maintaining QoS. EAR is supported with node monitoring and critical node detection (NMCND), network integration and message forwarding (NIMF), priority-based routing for node failure avoidance (PRNFA) and backup selection algorithms. In this article, the authors extend the work by adding a fault tolerance mathematical model. By evaluating the model, EAR shows to manage fault tolerance in deferent levels. To evaluate the effectiveness, the EAR fault tolerance is evaluated by simulation using OMNET++ Simulation. In addition, EAR reliability is measured and compared with RNF, DPCRA, ACR, and ACRA.