A Fault Tolerance Mechanism for On-Road Sensor Networks

Abstract

On-Road Sensor Networks (ORSNs) play an important role in capturing traffic flow data for predicting short-term traffic patterns, driving assistance and self-driving vehicles. However, this kind of network is prone to large-scale communication failure if a few sensors physically fail. In this paper, to ensure that the network works normally, an effective fault-tolerance mechanism for ORSNs which mainly consists of backup on-road sensor deployment, redundant cluster head deployment and an adaptive failure detection and recovery method is proposed. Firstly, based on the N − x principle and the sensors’ failure rate, this paper formulates the backup sensor deployment problem in the form of a two-objective optimization, which explains the trade-off between the cost and fault resumption. In consideration of improving the network resilience further, this paper introduces a redundant cluster head deployment model according to the coverage constraint. Then a common solving method combining integer-continuing and sequential quadratic programming is explored to determine the optimal location of these two deployment problems. Moreover, an Adaptive Detection and Resume (ADR) protocol is deigned to recover the system communication through route and cluster adjustment if there is a backup on-road sensor mismatch. The final experiments show that our proposed mechanism can achieve an average 90% recovery rate and reduce the average number of failed sensors at most by 35.7%.

A Robust Fault-Tolerance Scheme with Coverage Preservation for Planar Topology Based WSN

“…The major consequences of node or link failures are of great impact as they affect the monitoring efficiency and communication between nodes. The reliability of WSN can be affected by faults that may happen due to numerous reasons such as depletion of energy, environmental hazards or defective hardware [28,29]. An early detection of such faults is crucial for the effective functioning of the WSN.…”

“…Hence, fault-tolerance of a WSN is a general matter of interest in various application fields, and requires increased attention from researchers. The strategies in these researches may vary significantly, but essentially within the scope of constructing fault-tolerant WSN structure, resilience and recovery from failures [28][29][30][31]. In recent years, numerous researches have explored various aspects of fault tolerance and management in WSNs, but there still remain concerns to be addressed as not much work has been dedicated to deal with face structured WSNs.…”