An Adaptive Fault-tolerant Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

We devise an adaptive-fault tolerant scheme based on the Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) which can provide fault tolerant in sensor networks and balance between traffic overhead and transmission failure. We use the multipath routing to transmit packets, and according to wireless network environments we adaptively change the required number of paths for transmission. So it can achieve the optimization that takes fault tolerance into account with the optimal required number of paths. The source node uses Forward Error Correction (FEC) erasure coding to encode each packet into multiple fragments and transmits the fragments to sink over multipath which are node disjoint. The sink node can use erasure coding to reconstruct the original data if it receives enough fragments. In the simulation we compare our scheme with previous study, it increases the reliability of packet delivery in wireless sensor network, while decreases the total network traffic.