A Fault-tolerant Cluster-based Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper proposes a fault-tolerant cluster-based routing protocol (FTCRP) for Wireless Sensor Networks. Firstly, this protocol builds up clusters with the same method as LEACH. Then the new protocol employs a handshake mechanism to detect the states of CH nodes and NCH nodes. Once a CH node fails, NCH nodes will choose to sleep during the remaining slots. On the contrary, the slot time of dead NCH nodes would be allocated equally to other alive NCH nodes so as to increase the outgoing data. Comparing to existing fault-tolerant protocols, this protocol is simple, efficient and easy to implement. Simulation results show that, when the failure ratio of nodes is between 0.1 and 0.2, the lifetime of our new routing protocol is 25%-45% longer and gathers 10%-15% more data than LEACH. Also its lifetime is 15%-35% longer and gathers 5%-20% more data than CRAM.