Energy-efficient cluster-based scheme for failure management in sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are characterised by dense deployment of energy constrained nodes. Owing to the deployment of large number of sensor nodes in uncontrolled hostile environments and unmonitored operation, it is common for the nodes to exhaust its energy and become inactive. The failing nodes create holes in the network topology causing connectivity loss, which may lead to critical information loss. To avoid degradation of performance, it is necessary that the failures are detected well in advance and appropriate measures are taken to sustain the network operation. An energy-efficient cluster-based technique is proposed to detect failures and recover the cluster structure. The proposed technique relies on the cluster members to detect the failures in the cluster and recover the connectivity. The proposed failure detection and recovery technique recovers the cluster structure in less than one-fourth of the time taken by the Gupta algorithm and is also proven to be 70% more energy-efficient than the same. The proposed cluster-based failure detection and recovery scheme proves to be an efficient and quick solution to robust and scalable sensor network for long and sustained operation.