A Novel Fault Detection and Recovery Mechanism for Zigbee Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor networks (WSN) are prone to cause failures due to the constraining factors of energy, memory and communication capability. This paper describes an efficient faulty detection and recovery mechanism for ZigBee network which is an industrial standard widely adopted for WSN. We propose a localized tree based method for detecting faults due to energy exhaustion of nodes and repair them after node failure. We design three types of failure mechanisms depending on the type of node in the tree network of ZigBee. In order to avoid much more exchange message and reduce the collision of re-joining network, we take an ¿elected new parent¿ strategy from the disconnected children, and make the disconnected node re-join network together with as many descendant nodes as possible. Simulation results show that our proposed method consumes less energy than the original ZigBee network, and prolong the lifetime of network efficiently.