Decentralized Fault Detection and Management for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks are increasingly being deployed in long-lived, challenging application scenarios which demand a high level of availability and reliability. To achieve these characteristics in inherently unreliable and resource constrained sensor network environments, fault tolerance is required. This paper presents a generic and efficient fault tolerance algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks. In contrast to existing approaches, the algorithm presented in this paper is entirely decentralized and can thus be used to support fully autonomic fault tolerance in sensor network environments.