A Fault Management Architecture for Wireless Sensor Network

Advancement in wireless communication and electronics has made possible the development of low cost sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) facilitate monitoring and controlling of physical environment from remote location with better accuracy. They can be used for various application areas (e.g. health, military, home). Due to their unique characteristics, they are offering various research issues that are still unsolved. Sensors energy cannot support long haul communication as changing energy supply is not always possible in WSN. Also, failures are inevitable in wireless sensor networks due to inhospitable environment and unattended deployment. Therefore fault management is an essential component of any network management system. In this paper we propose a new fault management architecture for wireless sensor networks. In our solution the network is partitioned into a virtual grid of cells to support scalability and perform fault detection and recovery locally with minimum energy consumption. Specifically, the grid based architecture permits the implementation of fault detection in a distributed manner and allows the failure report to be forwarded across cells. A cell manager and a gateway node are chosen in each cell to perform management tasks. Cell manager and gateway nodes coordinate with each other to detect faults with minimum energy consumption. We assume a homogeneous network where all nodes are equal in resources. The architecture has been evaluated analytically and compared with different proposed solutions.