CFTM: A centralized fault tolerant mechanism for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Cluster Heads (CHs) in cluster based Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are considered as critical nodes since they are responsible of collecting data from cluster members, aggregating and then sending them to a sink node. The failure of CHs makes disconnected partitions in the network and hence will degrade the network performances, which makes the fault tolerance of CHs is a critical issue in WSNs. The existing fault tolerant mechanisms either consume important extra energy and time to detect and recover from the failures or need to use additional hardware and software resources. In this paper, we propose a Centralized Fault Tolerant Mechanism (CFTM) that deals efficiently with permanent and transient failures. The proposed mechanism is able to maintain the continuity of the network operation despite of CHs failures. The performance of the proposed mechanism was tested by means of simulations and compared against the Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) and Informer Homed Routing (IHR) protocols. The results show that our mechanism has better performance than its counterparts in terms of energy and time costs needed to tolerate failures as well as data received at the sink.