A cellular approach to fault detection and recovery in wireless sensor networks

In the past few years wireless sensor networks have received a greater interest in application such as disaster management, border protection, combat field reconnaissance and security surveillance. Sensor nodes are expected to operate autonomously in unattended environments and potentially in large numbers. Failures are inevitable in wireless sensor networks due to inhospitable environment and unattended deployment. The data communication and various network operations cause energy depletion in sensor nodes and therefore it is common for sensor nodes to exhaust its energy completely and stop operating. This may cause connectivity and data loss. Therefore, it is necessary that network failures are detected in advance and appropriate measures are taken to sustain network operation. In this paper we extend our cellular architecture and proposed a new mechanism to sustain network operation in the event of failure cause of energy-drained nodes. In our solution the network is partitioned into a virtual grid of cells to perform fault detection and recovery locally with minimum energy consumption. Specifically, the grid based architecture permits the implementation of fault detection and recovery in a distributed manner and allows the failure report to be forwarded across cells. The proposed failure detection and recovery algorithm has been compared with some existing related work and proven to be more energy efficient.