A novel fault tolerant and energy-aware based algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Sensor networks are increasingly being deployed for finer grained monitoring of physical environments subjected to critical conditions such as fire, leaking of toxic gases and explosions. A great challenge to these networks is to provide a continuos delivery of events even in the presence of emergency conditions that can lead to node failures and path disruption to the sink that receives those events. A sensor network to cope with such situations has to be fast and reliable enough to respond to adversities. This paper presents a fault tolerant and low latency algorithm that meets sensors network requirements for critical conditions surveillance applications. The algorithm uses the publish/subscribe mechanism and the concept of driven delivery of events, a technique that selects the fastest path for the notification of events, reducing latency. Fault-tolerance is achieved through fast reconfiguration of the network, which switches from a shortest path mode to a multi-path reliable event notification mode.