Fault Tolerance by Quartile Method in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Recent technological advances have lead to the emergence of wireless sensor and actor networks (WSAN) which sensors gather the information for an event and actors perform the appropriate actions. Since sensors are prone to failure due to energy depletion, hardware failure, and communication link errors, designing an efficient fault tolerance mechanism becomes an important issue in WSAN. However, most research focus on communication link fault tolerance without considering sensing fault tolerance on paper survey. In this situation, actor may perform incorrect action by receiving error sensing data. To solve this issue, fault tolerance by quartile method (FTQM) is proposed in this paper. In FTQM, it not only determines the correct data range but also sifts the correct sensors by data discreteness. Therefore, actors could perform the appropriate actions in FTQM. Moreover, FTQM also could be integrated with communication link fault tolerance mechanism. In the simulation results, it demonstrates FTQM has better predicted rate of correct data, the detected tolerance rate of temperature, and the detected temperature compared with the traditional sensing fault tolerance mechanism. Moreover, FTQM has better performance when the real correct data rate and the threshold value of failure are varied.