Fault-Tolerant Algorithms/Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have wide variety of applications and provide limitless future potentials. Nodes in WSNs are prone to be failure due to energy depletion, hardware failure, communication link errors, malicious attack, and so on. Therefore, fault tolerance is one of the critical issues in WSNs. The chapter investigates current research work on fault tolerance in WSNs. We study how fault tolerance is addressed in different applications of WSNs. Five categories of applications are discussed: node placement, topology control, target and event detection, data gathering and aggregation, and sensor surveillance. In each category, we focus on the representative research works that presented algorithms and approaches in application layer to achieve fault tolerance.