A self-managing fault management mechanism for wireless sensor networks

A sensor network can be described as a collection of sensor nodes which co-ordinate with each other to perform some specific function. These sensor nodes are mainly in large numbers and are densely deployed either inside the phenomenon or very close to it. They can be used for various application areas (e.g. health, military, home). Failures are inevitable in wireless sensor networks due to inhospitable environment and unattended deployment. Therefore, it is necessary that network failures are detected in advance and appropriate measures are taken to sustain network operation. We previously proposed a cellular approach for fault detection and recovery. In this paper we extend the cellular approach and propose a new fault management mechanism to deal with fault detection and recovery. We propose a hierarchical structure to properly distribute fault management tasks among sensor nodes by introducing more ‘self-managing’ functions. The proposed failure detection and recovery algorithm has been compared with some existing related work and proven to be more energy efficient.