A fault tolerance management framework for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have the potential of significantly enhancing our ability to monitor and interact with our physical environment. Realizing a faulttolerant operation is critical to the success of WSNs. The main challenge is providing fault tolerance (FT) while conserving the limited resources of the network. Many schemes have been proposed in this area. Our main contribution in this paper is to propose a general framework for fault tolerance in WSNs. The proposed framework can be used to guide the design and development of FT solutions and to evaluate existing ones. We present a comparative study of the existing schemes and identify potential enhancements. A primary module of the framework is the learning and refinement module which enables a FT solution to be adaptive and self-configurable based on changes in the network conditions. We view this as vital to the resource-constrained and highly dynamic WSNs. Up to our knowledge, we are the first to propose the implementation of such module in FT solutions for WSNs.