FT-CoWiseNets: A Fault Tolerance Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), faults may occur through malfunctioning hardware, software errors or by external causes such as fire and flood. In business applications where WSNs are applied, failures in essential parts of the sensor network must be efficiently detected and automatically recovered. Current approaches proposed in the literature do not cover all the requirements of a fault tolerant system to be deployed in an enterprise environment and therefore are not suitable for such applications. In this paper we investigate these solutions and present FT-CoWiseNets, a framework designed to improve the availability of heterogeneous WSNs through an efficient fault tolerance support. The proposed framework satisfies the requirements and demonstrates to be more adequate to business scenarios than the current approaches.