A Novel Dual Separate Paths (DSP) Algorithm Providing Fault-Tolerant Communication for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Fault tolerance has long been a major concern for sensor communications in fault-tolerant cyber physical systems (CPSs). Network failure problems often occur in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) due to various factors such as the insufficient power of sensor nodes, the dislocation of sensor nodes, the unstable state of wireless links, and unpredictable environmental interference. Fault tolerance is thus one of the key requirements for data communications in WSN applications. This paper proposes a novel path redundancy-based algorithm, called dual separate paths (DSP), that provides fault-tolerant communication with the improvement of the network traffic performance for WSN applications, such as fault-tolerant CPSs. The proposed DSP algorithm establishes two separate paths between a source and a destination in a network based on the network topology information. These paths are node-disjoint paths and have optimal path distances. Unicast frames are delivered from the source to the destination in the network through the dual paths, providing fault-tolerant communication and reducing redundant unicast traffic for the network. The DSP algorithm can be applied to wired and wireless networks, such as WSNs, to provide seamless fault-tolerant communication for mission-critical and life-critical applications such as fault-tolerant CPSs. The analyzed and simulated results show that the DSP-based approach not only provides fault-tolerant communication, but also improves network traffic performance. For the case study in this paper, when the DSP algorithm was applied to high-availability seamless redundancy (HSR) networks, the proposed DSP-based approach reduced the network traffic by 80% to 88% compared with the standard HSR protocol, thus improving network traffic performance.

A Novel Effective Multipath Routing Technique Providing High Availability in Wireless Networks

“…AODV is designed for single path routing and does not support multipath routing. Several approaches have been proposed to provide multipath routing for wireless networks [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18]. Out of the proposed multipath routing approaches, AOMDV, AODVM, and MP-AODV are multipath routing variants of AODV.…”

“…Therefore, multipath routing plays an important role in MANETs and WSNs. Several multipath routing protocols have been proposed to provide fault tolerance and load balancing for MANETs and WSNs [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18].…”

Techniques for Reducing Redundant Unicast Traffic in HSR Networks

“…Dual paths-based techniques reduce the redundant unicast traffic in an HSR network by forwarding unicast frames from a source to a destination in the network through two predefined separate paths instead of duplicating and flooding the frames into all rings as in the standard HSR protocol. There are several dual paths-based techniques, including dual virtual paths (DVP) [18], ring-based dual paths (RDP) [19], and dual separate paths (DSP) [20].…”

Enhanced Effective Filtering Approach (eEFA) for Improving HSR Network Performance in Smart Grids

“…These techniques discover and establish dual paths between a source and a destination in an HSR network before forwarding unicast traffic frames from the source to the destination through the dual paths. Dual paths-based techniques include the dual virtual paths (DVP) [14] technique, which was then extended as extended dual virtual paths (EDVP) [15], the ring-based dual paths (RDP) [16] technique, and the dual separate paths (DSP) [17] technique. These dual paths-based techniques significantly reduce redundant unicast traffic in HSR networks.…”