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

Abstract

Maintaining prolonged service lifetime and adequate quality of sensing coverage are the key challenges in constructing Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based applications. As such networks usually operate in inhospitable and hostile environment, failures are ineludible and providing resilience is a necessity. However, it is challenging to satisfy the conflicting problems of enhancing energy efficiency and fault tolerance simultaneously. Fault-tolerance is a significant requirement while designing WSN. It is crucial to detect the failures in advance and take necessary measures to maintain durable and efficient functioning of the network. Generally, in the existing face structured WSNs, node faults and failures can induce the formation of coverage holes, disrupt the face structure and consequently curtail the application performance. The coverage quality will affect the monitoring effectiveness of tracking applications, e.g., a moving target tracking. Moreover, node failures can cause the network to be partitioned, further reducing the accuracy in tracking. In this paper, we propose a robust fault-tolerance scheme with coverage preservation using a face structured WSN topology (F CAF T ). The key objective of the proposed F CAF T scheme is to sustain the performance of the network by timely healing the faults in the network, to enhance the durability and reliability of the WSN. The results of simulation and comparison with existing methods reveal that F CAF T is efficacious in sustaining the coverage and enhancing the service lifetime of WSN, which is a necessity for critical monitoring and tracking applications of WSNs.