A New Fault-Tolerant Clustering Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The major restriction of wireless sensor networks is represented by the energy requirements of the nodes. Also, the main challenge of these networks is their fault-tolerance feature since the nodes are scattered in remote, inaccessible areas. Therefore, these issues must be the main concern of the management of the network nodes and all the proposed protocols must be evaluated based on a fault-tolerance capacity and handling basic network restrictions. In this article, we introduce a new fault-tolerant clustering network consisting of two sections: in the first phase, the clustering configuration takes place, and in the second phase, we create a fault-tolerant management architecture that employs fault detection and recovery mechanisms. In the proposed protocol, besides improving the network fault-tolerance capacity, the impossibility of recharging nodes was a design factor. Thus, energy conservation and an increased network lifetime are two consequences related to the implementation of our proposed algorithm. The evaluations and comparisons prove that the proposed model - in addition to increasing the network nodes' fault-tolerance capacity - reduces the overall network energy consumption and lays the foundation for extending the network lifetime.