CPFR: Coverage preserving failure recovery in wireless sensor networks

Since sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are deployed randomly in hostile and ill-disposed environments, failures occur more frequently and unexpectedly as compared to other traditional networks. These frequent faults and failures in the network are major attributes towards poor quality of services (QoS). Therefore, for providing better QoS, such failures should be identified and recovered timely. On the other hand, wireless sensor nodes are resource constrained battery operated devices. Therefore, the failure diagnosis and recovery procedure should be energy efficient. In this work, we propose an energy efficient mechanism to diagnose and recover failures. At first, we propose a very low false alarming rate consensus based failure identification mechanism for diagnosing failures in the network. Secondly, an energy efficient coverage preserving failure recovery (CPFR) mechanism is proposed for recovering failures and maintaining an adequate coverage. The ns-2 based result shows that proposed scheme is able to diagnose failures with very low false alarming rate and is also able to recover failures by maintaining coverage above a threshold.