Energy-aware fault-tolerant clustering scheme for target tracking wireless sensor networks

Over the last few years, the deployment of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has been fostered in diverse applications. WSN has great potential for a variety of domains ranging from scientific experiments to commercial applications. Due to the deployment of WSNs in dynamic and unpredictable environments, these applications must have potential to cope with variety of faults. This paper proposes an energy-aware fault-tolerant clustering protocol for target tracking applications termed as the Fault-Tolerant Target Tracking (FTTT) protocol. The identification of redundant nodes (RNs) makes sensor node (SN) fault tolerance plausible and the clustering endorsed recovery of sensors supervised by a faulty cluster head (CH). The FTTT protocol intends two steps of reducing energy consumption: first, by identifying RNs in the network; secondly, by restricting the numbers of SNs sending data to the CH. Simulations validate the scalability and low power consumption of the FTTT protocol in comparison with LEACH protocol.