LIFT: Layer Independent Fault Tolerance Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) require pertinent and reliable data collection schemes in order to provide information about their deployment area. This article aims at detailing our contribution for message loss avoidance along prone-to-failure paths that monitoring reports would follow from sensors to sink stations. While many researchers have tackled this issue by focusing on particular layers of the embedded communication stack (e.g. medium access control or routing protocol), we propose an original layer-independent scheme. The key aspect of our solution is to create fake data sources that have acted as storage nodes during the failure of links leading to the sink station. Few control messages are required during our gradual recovery phase, thus maintaining a negligible overhead in terms of message complexity and energy consumption, and also resulting in much improved data delivery ratio.