Efficient Cluster-Based Fault-Tolerant Schemes for Wireless Sensor Networks

The deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) over a geographical area for monitoring physical phenomena is prone to several failures due to energy depletion, environmental hazards, hardware failure, communication link errors, etc. These failures prevent them to fulfill their tasks normally. In addition, in safety applications, these failures lead to hazardous consequences. Thus, it is necessary to adopt an efficient fault-tolerant approach to ensure the availability of sensor data anytime and anywhere in WSNs. In this paper, we proposed two efficient cluster-based fault-tolerant schemes enabling to reduce communication and processing overhead. These schemes are respectively denoted ECFS-1 and ECFS-2. ECFS-1 could tolerate link failures and therefore guarantee routing reliability while ECFS-2 could tolerate both sensor faults and links failures. Finally, we conducted several simulations to illustrate the effectiveness of our contribution and compared obtained results to other schemes.