Title: An autonomous fault resistant system for mission-critical embedded sensor nodes

Authors: Hsung-Pin Chang; Tsung-Yu Yeh

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, 402, Taiwan ' Institute of Networking and Multimedia, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, 402, Taiwan

Abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are promising new instruments for monitoring and collecting data about some outside world phenomena. For some mission critical applications, the wireless sensor networks are expected to provide continuous, unattended service for months or even years. However, hardware reliability poses a major challenge to this expectation. Based on a dual-mote architecture, this paper designs and implements an autonomous fault-resistant system. First, a software-based minimal-overhead fault detection method is proposed to detect failures in various hardware components. When a hardware failure is detected, the sensor node lifetime is prolonged by proposing the partial replacement and full replacement fault recovery schemes. Both fault detection and recovery schemes are implemented in the SOS kernel on the mica2 mote. Experimental results indicate that except for the memory access trap, most failures can be successfully detected through low-cost software detectors. In addition, the fault recovery scheme can choose proper replacement methods for different application modules and successfully increase the lifetime of sensor nodes.

Keywords: fault management; fault detection; fault recovery; SOS; embedded sensor nodes.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2018.090562

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2018 Vol.10 No.2, pp.89 - 103

Received: 17 Apr 2015
Accepted: 09 May 2016

Published online: 22 Mar 2018 *

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