A Fault Management Architecture for Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

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.

A Survey of Fault Tolerance Management Frameworks, Fault Detection and Recovery Techniques for WSNs

“…In this procedure, network is divided into different parts and each part is managed by a sensor node. For example, in (Asim et al, 2008), a cellular architecture is used for the network which consists of a virtual network of cells. Each cell can be also considered as a cluster.…”

Discrete Path Selection and Entropy Based Sensor Node Failure Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Many algorithms for failure detection in wireless sensor networks have been proposed and implemented with their share of pros and cons [10][11][12]. Fault management architecture and smart detection techniques tend to address failure detection in WSN [13,14]. In our work, a method to detect failed sensor network by selecting paths efficiently, minimizing the time required for the detection process has been proposed.…”

“…Energy drained while reception of a packet is given by (13) ERX(K,d) = EelecK, where, K is the number of bits received, Eelec is the energy required for processing the bits after the reception. Table 1.…”

A Routing Failure Node Detection Method of Wireless Sensors Based on Binary Encoding

“…For such problems, it will provides necessary information for subsequent remedial measures, such as network re-topology and routing repairing, if failure nodes can be found and be located as soon as possible. Therefore, increasing attention has paid on relative works about nodes failure detection [1][2][3].…”