Increasing Lifetime and Fault Tolerance Capability in Wireless Sensor Networks by Providing a Novel Management Framework

Abstract

The main application of wireless sensor networks is to monitor remote and dangerous areas that are inaccessible or difficult and or costly to reach by humans. This characteristic makes these networks be self-managed, face the challenges of fault tolerance and energy and network lifetime constraints due to non-renewable energy sources. In this paper, a management framework capable of providing and increasing network fault tolerance is introduced. To design such a framework, fault detection and recovery mechanisms for various fault levels including network nodes and communications between them have been used. The proposed management framework and protocols increase network's fault tolerance capability in network nodes and in the communications between them. Also, the network lifetime increases three to five times more. On the one hand, it's expected that the provision of network fault tolerance would decrease network's lifetime and since it increases information exchange, it would increase energy consumption and cause reduced network life time, however the final results suggest a several-fold increase of network lifetime.