Deploying Backup sensors for Fault Tolerance in Structural Health Monitoring

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have wide variety of applications and provide limitless future potentials. Structural health monitoring (SHM) is one of them which pose new challenges to wireless sensor networks. Nodes in WSNs are prone to sudden depletion of energy, hardware error, communication link failure due to irregular shape of the structures, malicious attack, and so on. Therefore, fault tolerance is one of the major issues in WSNs. To make the SHM resistant to the faults, we present an approach, called Backup sensors for Fault Tolerant Structural Health Monitoring to provide guaranteed degree of fault tolerance. Repair points are found out in the network and a set of backup sensors are placed at those points to increase availability of nodes and make the network fault tolerant, thus SHM remains working efficiently even in the event of a sensor faults, prolonging the WSN lifetime under constraints.