A new fault-tolerant method for wireless sensor network design

Faults of WSN often occur in applications because of severe disturbance, harsh environment and inherent weakness of the network. The node fault is the most common among all types of faults. Based on back-up nodes and a heartbeat detection algorithm to detect node failure, a directed diffusion protocol with fault tolerance functionality, termed fault-tolerant algorithm of single-node-backup (FTASNB), is proposed to extend the lifetime of the wireless sensor network. In FTASNB, each intermediate node has a redundant node for fault tolerant function to increase the rate of successful data reception. The simulation result shows that more messages can be received on the sink node using FTASNB compared with the traditional DD protocol in tolerable amount of delay time and energy consumption.