Title: Distributed fault detection and recovery algorithms in two-tier wireless sensor networks

Authors: Kumar Nitesh; Prasanta K. Jana

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad-826004, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad-826004, India

Abstract: Failure of relay nodes in a cluster-based WSN is catastrophic as they act as cluster heads that are responsible for collecting sensed data, aggregate them and send to a sink. Therefore, fault tolerance of relay nodes is an important issue in cluster based WSNs. In this paper, we present a distributed algorithm to detect faulty relay nodes with O(m) message complexity where m is the number of relay nodes. It is shown that the proposed algorithm can detect any relay node with transient or permanent fault based on neighbouring table information. We also propose a distributed algorithm for local recovery of the member sensor nodes of a failed relay node with message exchange complexity of O(n) where n is the number of sensor nodes. The proposed algorithms are simulated extensively using Weibull distribution under several scenarios of WSN and compared with existing algorithms to show its superiority.

Keywords: failed relay nodes; fault detection; fault recovery; detection accuracy; Weibull distribution; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; fault tolerance; relay node failure; simulation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCNDS.2016.076654

International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems, 2016 Vol.16 No.3, pp.281 - 296

Received: 21 Feb 2015
Accepted: 29 Jan 2016
Published online: 18 May 2016 *

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