Multilevel fault-tolerance for designing dependable wireless networks

As wireless networks are increasingly deployed in the enterprise and other environments and such trends are expected to intensify with the emergence of high performance wireless networks, an important and emerging area of research is the dependability of wireless networks. Although, the dependability problem also arises in wireline counterparts, user mobility, location and link dependence, and fault propagation make dependability a challenging task in wireless networks. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a multilevel, fault-tolerant design for the emerging wireless networks. Extensive simulation results show that increased user mobility can be compensated by deploying multi-level redundancy and the performance of wireless link is not critical in the overall availability as long as the link availability stays above a certain threshold. One major contribution of our work is to demonstrate that optimal dependability performance can only be achieved by fault-tolerance at network level.