Studies on Fault Tolerance in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) consists of a network of devices that is used to transmit the information collected from the environment using small, low cost and limited energy battery operated sensor nodes. Generally, the WSNs are designed to operate in harsh environments and are exposed to different types of damage like physical, chemical and other external damage that may result in node failure. So, in order to keep the system functional, it is very important that the WSN be fault-tolerant. The fault-tolerance refers to the ability of a system to perform at a desired level even in the presence of faults .The study of fault-tolerance in WSN requires development of efficient mechanisms for identification of faulty nodes, fault-tolerant routing, fault-tolerant data aggregation and fault-tolerant cluster deployment. The present Thesis has made systematic attempts in the above said direction and developed some efficient mechanisms for achieving fault-tolerance in cluster based WSNs. The proposed techniques have been compared on common platform with the similarly situated other existing techniques through simulation. newline