Fault Tolerance In Wireless Sensor Networks Research Articles

MIROS: a hybrid real-time energy-efficient operating system for the resource-constrained wireless sensor nodes.

Operating system (OS) technology is significant for the proliferation of the wireless sensor network (WSN). With an outstanding OS; the constrained WSN resources (processor; memory and energy) can be utilized efficiently. Moreover; the user application development can be served soundly. In this article; a new hybrid; real-time; memory-efficient; energy-efficient; user-friendly and fault-tolerant WSN OS MIROS is designed and implemented. MIROS implements the hybrid scheduler and the dynamic memory allocator. Real-time scheduling can thus be achieved with low memory consumption. In addition; it implements a mid-layer software EMIDE (Efficient Mid-layer Software for User-Friendly Application Development Environment) to decouple the WSN application from the low-level system. The application programming process can consequently be simplified and the application reprogramming performance improved. Moreover; it combines both the software and the multi-core hardware techniques to conserve the energy resources; improve the node reliability; as well as achieve a new debugging method. To evaluate the performance of MIROS; it is compared with the other WSN OSes (TinyOS; Contiki; SOS; openWSN and mantisOS) from different OS concerns. The final evaluation results prove that MIROS is suitable to be used even on the tight resource-constrained WSN nodes. It can support the real-time WSN applications. Furthermore; it is energy efficient; user friendly and fault tolerant.

A fault-tolerant relay placement algorithm for ensuring k vertex-disjoint shortest paths in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are prone to failures. To be robust to failures, the network topology should provide alternative routes to the sinks so when failures occur the routing protocol can still offer reliable delivery. Our contribution is a solution that enables fault-tolerant WSN deployment planning by judicious use of a minimum number of additional relays. A WSN is robust if at least one route with an acceptable length to a sink is available for each sensor node after the failure of any k-1 nodes. In this paper, we define the problem for increasing WSN reliability by deploying a number of additional relays to ensure that each sensor node in the initial design has k length-bounded vertex-disjoint shortest paths to the sinks. To identify the maximum k such that each node has k vertex-disjoint shortest paths, we propose Counting-Paths and its dynamic programming variant. Then, we introduce GRASP-ARP, a centralised offline algorithm that uses Counting-Paths to minimise the number of deployed relays. Empirically, it deploys 35% fewer relays with reasonable runtime compared to the closest approach. Using network simulation, we show that GRASP-ARP’s designs offer a substantial improvement over the original topologies, maintaining connectivity for twice as many surviving nodes after 10% of the original nodes have failed.

An Improved Byzantine Fault-tolerant Program for WSNs

In order to increase the level of fault-tolerance of wireless sensor networks, thus to enhance the reliability and accuracy, we studies the traditional byzantine fault-tolerant program, and makes improvements in the environment of WSNs, reducing the number of rounds of message exchange between network nodes, thus improving the efficiency and reducing communication overhead and energy consumption. The simulation result shows that our program makes all normal network nodes reach an agreement, while the number of rounds of message exchange greatly decreases compared to the traditional byzantine program.

Energy-aware topology control for reliable data delivery in solar-powered WSNs

Solar power is a valuable source of power for wireless sensor networks, but it periodically requires an appropriate energy management strategy. We introduce a scheme that constructs and maintains a fault-tolerant wireless sensor network topology that can make the best use of solar energy. This topology control scheme is based on a simple model of the availability of solar energy and matches the connectivity of each node with the energy left in its battery. Operating locally, our scheme constructs and maintains a k-connected backbone of energy-rich nodes that handles most of the network’s traffic reliably, without depleting the reserves of energy-poor nodes. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme.

Dual power assignment optimization and fault tolerance in WSNs

Because of limited battery equipped on each sensor, power consumption is one of the crucial issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It therefore has been the focus of many researchers. An important problem concerning power consumption is to minimize the number of maximum-power nodes while maintaining a desired network topology. As fault tolerance is vitally important in practice, it is desirable that the constructed network topology is $$k$$k-edge-connected or $$k$$k-connected. In this paper, we study the dual power assignment problem for $$k$$k-edge connectivity $$(kEDP)$$(kEDP) and biconnectivity in WSNs. While other studies consider only the special case $$k=2$$k=2, our goal is to address the general problem. In addition to showing the APX-completeness of biconnectivity problem in the metric model, we also prove the NP-completeness of the $$kEDP$$kEDP problem in the geometric case and provide a 2-approximation algorithm using linear programming techniques. To the best of our knowledge, this approximation ratio is currently the best one. We also introduce a heuristic whose performance is better compared with an approximation algorithm in Wang et al. (J Comb Optim 19:174---183, 2010).

Reliable Data Transportation in Wireless Sensor Networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of sensor nodes and base stations which are connected via wireless medium. A key functionality of WSNs consists in collecting information from sensor nodes & transporting the information of interest to the base stations required by the applications. Wireless connectivity, size and low cost of sensors in WSNs are its advantages which enable it to be deployed in hostile or inaccessible environments at a very low cost. However, WSNs suffer from high data loss due to error prone wireless transmission medium, transmission problems in hostile environments and node failures due to limited energy of sensor nodes. Hence reliable data transportation i.e. ensuring data delivery with minimum loss becomes the key issue in WSNs. The amount of loss tolerated is application dependent. This paper presents an artificial neural network based model for reliable data transportation in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). This work increases the reliability of information transportation despite of corrupted signal sensed at the sensors and thus is an attempt to design a fault tolerant WSN.

Reliability Modeling of Context Aware Wireless SensorNetwork

The objective of the paper is to propose a reliability model for a fault tolerant wireless sensor network using context awareness feature in order to evaluate network reliability by modeling in PI Calculus. The earlier Propositional Directed Acyclic Graph (PDAG) approach leads to an identification of a suitable structure function in polynomial time to evaluate the reliability of wireless Sensor Network (WSN). In that approach, the nodes and links of the network are assumed as context free, makes the determination of the reliability function complex if the number of nodes is increased. The context awareness of the nodes and links are used to decompose and reduce the structure function for that network of any topology. The proposed context aware structure function algorithm helps not only to determine the structure function but also decide the most reliable path from source to terminal without affecting the network performance and accurately determines the reliability in the case of node and link failures.

Weak Estimation-Based Algorithm Fault-Tolerant Routing Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are characterized by the cooperative engagement of mobile nodes that constitute networks possessing continuously-changing infrastructures, the bereavement of centralized network managers, access points, fixed base stations, a backbone network for controlling the network management functions.While comprehensive studies have been carried out in the past several years for many sensor applications, they cannot be applied to the network with extremely low and sporadic connectivity, dubbed the Fault-Tolerant Wireless Sensor Network (FT-WSN). Without end-to-end connections due to sparse network density and sensor node stimulus, routing in FT-WSN becomes localized and ties closely to medium access control, which naturally calls for merging Layer 3 and Layer 2 protocols in order to reduce overheadand improve network efficiency. FT-WSN is fundamentallyan opportunistic network, where the communication linksexist only with certain probabilities and become the scarcestresource .there is a tradeoff between link utilization and energy efficiency.

Design of fault tolerant wireless sensor networks satisfying survivability and lifetime requirements

Sensor networks are deployed to accomplish certain specific missions over a period of time. It is essential that the network continues to operate, even if some of its nodes fail. It is also important that the network is able to support the mission for a minimum specified period of time. Hence, the design of a sensor network should not only provide some guarantees that all data from the sensor nodes are gathered at the base station, even in the presence of some faults, but should also allow the network to remain functional for a specified duration. This paper considers a two-tier, hierarchical sensor network architecture, where some relay nodes, provisioned with higher power and other capabilities, are used as cluster heads. Given a distribution of sensor nodes in a sensor network, finding the locations to place a minimum number of relay nodes such that, each sensor node is covered by at least one relay node, is known to be a computationally difficult problem. In addition, for successful and reliable data communication, the relay nodes network needs to be connected, as well as resilient to node failures. In this paper, a novel integrated Integer Linear Program (ILP) formulation is proposed, which, unlike existing techniques, not only finds a suitable placement strategy for the relay nodes, but also assigns the sensor nodes to the clusters and determines a load-balanced routing scheme. Therefore, in addition to the desired levels of fault tolerance for both the sensor nodes and the relay nodes, the proposed approach also meets specified performance guarantees with respect to network lifetime by limiting the maximum energy consumption of the relay nodes.

Research on a Real-Time Fault Tolerant Time Synchronization Algorithm for GSM-R Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Network Materials

Time synchronization is a key technology in wireless sensor networks. In this paper, aim at high-speed railway GSM-R network require higher real time, fault tolerance and band coverage way, presents a real-time fault-tolerant wireless sensor network time synchronization algorithm, using direct forwarding strategy, regression analysis and abnormal data filtering methods to meet the requirements of GSM-R network. Analysis and simulation show that the algorithm has good real-time and fault tolerance to meet the requirements of GSM-R network applications.

FDAC: Toward Fine-Grained Distributed Data Access Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

Distributed sensor data storage and retrieval have gained increasing popularity in recent years for supporting various applications. While distributed architecture enjoys a more robust and fault-tolerant wireless sensor network (WSN), such architecture also poses a number of security challenges especially when applied in mission-critical applications such as battlefield and e-healthcare. First, as sensor data are stored and maintained by individual sensors and unattended sensors are easily subject to strong attacks such as physical compromise, it is significantly harder to ensure data security. Second, in many mission-critical applications, fine-grained data access control is a must as illegal access to the sensitive data may cause disastrous results and/or be prohibited by the law. Last but not least, sensor nodes usually are resource-constrained, which limits the direct adoption of expensive cryptographic primitives. To address the above challenges, we propose, in this paper, a distributed data access control scheme that is able to enforce fine-grained access control over sensor data and is resilient against strong attacks such as sensor compromise and user colluding. The proposed scheme exploits a novel cryptographic primitive called attribute-based encryption (ABE), tailors, and adapts it for WSNs with respect to both performance and security requirements. The feasibility of the scheme is demonstrated by experiments on real sensor platforms. To our best knowledge, this paper is the first to realize distributed fine-grained data access control for WSNs.

A Neural Approach for Reliable and Fault Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents a neural model for reliable and fault tolerant transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks based on Bi-directional Associative Memory. The proposed model is an attempt to enhance the performances of both the cooperative and non cooperative Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) schemes in terms of reliability and fault tolerance. We have also demonstrated the performances of both the schemes with the help of suitable examples.

Energy Efficient, Delay Sensitive, Fault Tolerant Wireless Sensor Network for Military Monitoring

In this article, a new TDMA based wireless sensor network (WSN), MILMON, is proposed for military monitoring. The most important design considerations of MILMON are energy consumption, delay, scalability, and fault tolerance. There are three main components of the system: a new time synchronization schema based on the sink with a high range transmitter, hr-FTSP; data indicator slot mechanism, DISM; and a new distributed time-scheduling mechanism ft_DTSM. An analytic and simulation model has shown that energy consumption and delay performance of the newly proposed system is better than most of the existing WSN systems. Although there may be other architectures which perform better than our system for certain performance metrics, MILMON can operate with a good balance on energy consumption, delay, and fault tolerance.

Hierarchical Aggregation and Intelligent Monitoring and Control in Fault-Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks

Hierarchical Aggregation and Intelligent Monitoring and Control in Fault-Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks

Hierarchical Aggregation and Intelligent Monitoring and Control in Fault-Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks

<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> The primary idea behind deploying sensor networks is to utilize the distributed sensing capability provided by tiny, low powered, and low cost devices. Multiple sensing devices can be used cooperatively and collaboratively to capture events or monitor space more effectively than a single sensing device. The realm of applications envisioned for sensor networks is diverse including military, aerospace, industrial, commercial, environmental, and health monitoring. Typical examples include: traffic monitoring of vehicles, cross-border infiltration detection and assessment, military reconnaissance and surveillance, target tracking, habitat monitoring, and structure monitoring, to name a few. Most of the applications envisioned with sensor networks demand highly reliable, accurate, and fault-tolerant data acquisition process. In this paper, we focus on innovative approaches to deal with multivariable, multispace problem domains (data integrity, energy-efficiency, and fault-tolerant framework) in wireless sensor networks and present novel ideas that have practical implementation in developing power-aware software components for designing robust networks of sensing devices. </para>

Redundancy Analysis and a Distributed Self-Organization Protocol for Fault-Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor nodes in a distributed sensor network can fail due to a variety of reasons, e.g., harsh environmental conditions, sabotage, battery failure, and component wear-out. Since many wireless sensor networks are intended to operate in an unattended manner after deployment, failing nodes cannot be replaced or repaired during field operation. Therefore, by designing the network to be fault-tolerant, we can ensure that a wireless sensor network can perform its surveillance and tracking tasks even when some nodes in the network fail. In this paper, we describe a fault-tolerant self-organization scheme that designates a set of backup nodes to replace failed nodes and maintain a backbone for coverage and communication. The proposed scheme does not require a centralized server for monitoring node failures and for designating backup nodes to replace failed nodes. It operates in a fully distributed manner and it requires only localized communication. This scheme has been implemented on top of an energy-efficient self-organization technique for sensor networks. The proposed fault-tolerance-node selection procedure can tolerate a large number of node failures using only localized communication, without losing either sensing coverage or communication connectivity.

A Fault Tolerance Management Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have the potential of significantly enhancing our ability to monitor and interact with our physical environment. Realizing a fault-tolerant operation is critical to the success of WSN. The main challenge is providing fault-tolerance (FT) while conserving the limited resources of the network. Our main contribution in this paper is to propose a general framework for fault-tolerance in WSN. The proposed framework can be used to guide the design and development of FT solutions and to evaluate existing ones. We present a comparative study of the existing schemes and identify potential enhancements. A primary module of the framework is the learning and refinement module which enables a FT solution to be adaptive and self-configurable based on changes in the network conditions. We view this as vital to the resource-constrained and highly dynamic WSN. Up to our knowledge, we are the first to propose the implementation of such module in FT solutions for WSN.

Fault-tolerant wireless sensor network routing protocols for the supervision of context-aware physical environments

Applications that require fine-grain monitoring of physical environments subjected to critical conditions, such as fire, leaking of toxic gases and explosions, pose a great challenge to sensor network protocols. These networks have to provide a fast, reliable, fault-tolerant and energy-aware channel for events diffusion, which meets the requirements of query-based, event-driven and periodic sensor networks application scenarios. These requirements have to be met even in the presence of emergency conditions that can lead to node failures and path disruption to the sink. This paper proposes two routing protocols: periodic, event-driven and query-based protocol (PEQ) and its variation CPEQ, two fault-tolerant and low-latency algorithms that meet sensor network requirements for critical conditions supervision in context-aware physical environments. While PEQ can provide low latency for event notification, fast broken path reconfiguration, and high reliability in the delivery of event packets for low-network data traffic, CPEQ is a cluster-based routing protocol that groups sensor nodes to efficiently relay the sensed data to the sink by uniformly distributing energy dissipation among the nodes and reducing latency for high-network data traffic (typical in emergency situations). PEQ and its variant CPEQ use the publish/subscribe paradigm to disseminate requests across the network. We discuss both PEQ and CPEQ protocols, their implementation, and report on the performance results of several scenarios using NS-2 simulator. The results obtained are compared with the well-known directed diffusion (DD) protocol, and show that our proposed algorithms exhibit a clear indication to meet the constraints and requirements of critical condition supervision in context-aware physical environments. Our results indicate that PEQ outperforms DD in the average delay since it uses the shortest path for the delivery of packets and speed up new subscriptions by using the reverse path used for event notification packets. CPEQ also outperforms DD in both the average delay and in the packet delivery ratio when the network scales up.

Handbook of sensor networks: compact wireless and wired sensing systems

INTRODUCTION Opportunities and Challenges in Wireless Sensor Networks, M. Haenggi, Next Generation Technologies to Enable Sensor Networks, J. I. Goodman, A. I. Reuther, and D. R. Martinez Sensor Networks Management, L. B. Ruiz, J. M. Nogueira, and A. A. F. Loureiro Models for Programmability in Sensor Networks, A. Boulis Miniaturizing Sensor Networks with MEMS, Brett Warneke A Taxonomy of Routing Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks, J. N. Al-Karaki and A. E. Kamal Artificial Perceptual Systems, A. Loutfi, M. Lindquist, and P. Wide APPLICATIONS Sensor Network Architecture and Applications, C. Shen, C. Jaikaeo, and C. Srisathapornphat, A Practical Perspective on Wireless Sensor Networks, Q. Wang, H. Hassanein, and K. Xu, Introduction to Industrial Sensor Networking, M. Sveda, P. Benes, R. Vrba, and F. Zezulka, A Sensor Networks for Biological Data Acquisition, T. Small, Z. J. Haas, A. Purgue, and K. Fristrup ARCHITECTURE Sensor Network Architecture, J. Feng, F. Koushanfar, and M. Potkonjak Tiered Architectures in Sensor Networks, M. Yarvis and W. Ye Energy Efficient Topologies for Wireless Sensor Networks, A. Salheih and L. Schwiebert, Architecture and Modeling of Dynamic Sensor Networks, S. Papavassiliou, and J. Zhu PROTOCOLS Overview of Communication Protocols for Sensor Networks, W. Su, E. Cayirci, and O. B. Akan A Communication Architecture and Programming Abstraction for Real - Time Embedded Sensor Networks, T. Abdelzaher, J. Stankovic, S. Son, B. Blum, T. He, A. Wood, and C. Lu, A Comparative Study of Energy Efficient (E2) Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks, Q. Wang, and H. Hassanein TRACKING TECHNIQUES Coverage in Wireless Sensor Networks, M. Cardei, and J. Wu Location Management in Wireless Sensor Networks, J. Beutel, Positioning and Tracking in Wireless Sensor Networks, Y. C. Tseng, C. F. Huang, and S. P. Kuo Tracking Techniques in Air Vehicle Based Decentralized Sensor Networks, M. Ridley, L. L. Ong, E. Nettleton, and S. Sukkarieh, A DATA GATHERING AND PROCESSING Fundamental Protocols to Gather Information on Wireless Sensor Networks, J. Bordim, and K. Nakano Comparison of Data Processing Techniques in Sensor Networks, V. Gonzalez, and E. Sanchis On Computational and Networking Problems in Distributed Sensor Networks, Q. Wu, N. S. V. Rao, R. R. Brooks, S. S. Iyengar, and M. Zhu Cooperative Computing in Sensor Networks, L. Iftode, C. Borcea, and P. Kang ENERGY MANAGEMENT Dynamic Power Management in Sensor Networks, A. Sinha and A. Chandrakasan Design Challenges in Energy Efficient Medium Access Control for Wireless Sensor Networks, D. Dewasurendra, A. Mishra Techniques to Reduce Computation and Communication Energy in Wireless Sensor Networks, V. Swaminathan, Y. Zou, and K. Chakrabarty Energy Aware Routing and Data Funneling in Sensor Networks, R. C. Shah, D. Petrovic, and Jan M. Rabaey SECURITY, RELIABILITY AND FAULT-TOLERANCE Security and privacy Protection in Wireless Sensor Networks, S. Slijepcevic, J. L. Wong, and M. Potkonjak A Taxonomy for Denial-of-Service Attacks in Wireless Sensor Networks, A. D. Wood, and J. A. Stankovic Reliability Support in Sensor Networks, A. Lim Reliable Energy-Constrained Routing in Sensor Networks, R. Kannan, L. Ray, and S. S. Iyenger Fault-Tolerant Interval Estimation in Sensor Networks, Y. Zhu, B. Li, and Z. You Fault-Tolerance in Wireless Sensor Networks, F. Koushanfar, M. Potkanjak, and A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli PERFORMANCE AND DESIGN ASPECTS Low Power Design for Smart Dust Networks, Z. Karakehayou Energy Efficient Design for Distributed Sensor Networks, L. Yuan and G. Qu Wireless Sensor Networks and Computational Geometry, X. Y. Li, and Y. Wang Localized Algorithms for Sensor Networks, J. Feng, F. Koushanfar, and M. Potkonjak