A self-managing fault management mechanism for wireless sensor networks

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