A Backup Node Based Fault-tolerance Scheme for Coverage Preserving in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, the limited battery resources of sensor nodes have a direct impact on network lifetime. To reduce unnecessary power consumption, it is often the case that only a minimum number of sensor nodes operate in active mode while the others are kept in sleep mode. In such a case, however, the network service can be easily unreliable if any active node is unable to perform its sensing or communication function because of an unexpected failure. Thus, for achieving reliable sensing, it is important to maintain the sensing level even when some sensor nodes fail. In this paper, we propose a new fault-tolerance scheme, called FCP(Fault-tolerant Coverage Preserving), that gives an efficient way to handle the degradation of the sensing level caused by sensor node failures. In the proposed FCP scheme, a set of backup nodes are pre-designated for each active node to be used to replace the active node in case of its failure. Experimental results show that the FCP scheme provides enhanced performance with reduced overhead in terms of sensing coverage preserving, the number of backup nodes and the amount of control messages. On the average, the percentage of coverage preserving is improved by 87.2% while the additional number of backup nodes and the additional amount of control messages are reduced by 57.6% and 99.5%, respectively, compared with previous fault-tolerance schemes.