Articulation Node Failure Recovery for Multi-Channel Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used nowadays and in a various domains. However, the specificity of the nodes deployed in this type of networks makes them prone to failures. To overcome this problem and guarantee the continuity of the network functioning even in the presence of node failure, fault tolerance mechanisms need to be designed and integrated to the operation of those networks. These fault tolerance mechanisms will more precisely deal with recovering from a failures and resuming the correct functioning of a WSN. With that aim, we propose in this paper a new centralized curative approach, called Rotating Nodes based Failure Recovery (RNFR), dedicated to restore connectivity in multi-channel WSNs. The proposed solution targets the failure of particular nodes designated as articulation nodes, which leads to the partitioning of the WSN into many segments isolated from each other and leading to connectivity loss. Therefore, the main tasks of RNFR are the restoration of the connectivity after an articulation node failure using reorganization and reallocation of channels. Moreover, the solution uses a node rotation technique to communicate the recovery information to all the disjoint parts of the network. The proposed approach proved to be interesting by giving motivating results while evaluated through simulation.