Fault Recovery in Time-Synchronized Mission Critical ZigBee-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Reliability and precise timestamping of events that occur are two of the most important requirements for mission critical wireless sensor networks. Accurate timestamping is obtained by synchronizing the nodes to each other while reliability can be obtained by eliminating single points of failure (SPF). In this paper, we address the SPF problem of a ZigBee-based wireless sensor network by means of using multiple coordinators with different personal area network identifiers (PAN IDs). We propose a solution where members of a network switch from one coordinator to another in case of failure by changing their respective PAN ID. We verify experimentally that our solution provides gains in terms of recovery speed and, therefore, synchronization accuracy with respect to a solution proposed in the literature. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York.