Fault-tolerant and energy-efficient permutation routing protocol for wireless networks

A wireless network (WN) is a distributed system where each node is a small hand-held commodity device called a station. Wireless sensor networks have received increasing interest in recent years due to their usage in monitoring and data collection in a wide variety of environments like remote geographic locations, industrial plants, toxic locations or even office buildings. Two of the most important issues related to a WN are their energy constraints and their potential for developing faults. A station is usually powered by a battery which cannot be recharged while on a mission. Hence, any protocol run by a WN should be energy-efficient. Moreover, it is possible that all stations deployed as part of a WN may not work perfectly. Hence, any protocol designed for a WN should work well even when some of the stations are faulty. We design a protocol which is both energy-efficient and fault-tolerant for permutation routing in a WN.