Efficient Fault-Tolerant Backbone Construction in Tmote Sky Sensor Networks

In this study, we have investigated the effectiveness of building ¿Fault-Tolerant Backbone¿ for data dissemination in Tmote Sky sensor networks. Tmote Sky sensors provide programmable and adjustable output power for data transmission. Users can control adequate transmission power for each sensor. Based on our measurements of Tmote Sky, there is a steadily transmitted distance for every power level. For certain power level, successfully-transmitted ratio was approximately 100 percent when the distance between sender and receiver was less than the steadily-transmitted distance. In accordance with the character on Tmote Sky, the ideas of fault-tolerant backbone has been made for constructing a fault-tolerant and stable system for Tmote Sky. The fault-tolerant backbone protocol builds up a connected backbone, in which nodes are endowed with a sleep/awake schedule. Practical experimental results reveal the fast fault recovery and high successfully-transmitted ratio can be fulfilled in the realistic system. The following goals in the implementation have been reached, including self-configurable fault-tolerant groups, automatic backbone construction, automatic failure recovery, and route repair.