Agent based fault tolerance in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), sensor nodes are densely deployed in the network covered area, and have limited communication, computation capability and storage capacity. The proposed work is a multi-agent based fault tolerance scheme in wireless sensor networks by employing a set of static and mobile agents. We propose a scheme to implement fault tolerance to estimate the faulty behaviour and then construct the fault tolerance at different hierarchy such as, Node, cluster and sink level fault tolerance. (1) In node level fault tolerance model, where node receives only correct samples which are in reference range by discarding the false samples, and node computes average of all correct samples. (2) In cluster level fault tolerance model where cluster head receives data from all nodes and received data of each node is compared with all other nodes data and computes the difference. Fault tolerance in cluster level is achieved by eliminating the incorrect data of nodes. (3) In sink level fault tolerance algorithm, where sink periodically broadcast alive packets to all nodes and duplicate sink node. After that, nodes transmit data to duplicate sink node. The performance of the proposed scheme is tested in terms of performance parameters such as energy consumption, error, node level faults and cluster level faults.