Maximum network lifetime in fault tolerant sensor networks

This paper introduces a novel technique to maximize the lifetime of fault tolerant sensor networks. The proposed architecture uses multipath diversity in the network layer and erasure codes. We use a distributed sink where information arrives at the sink via multiple proxy nodes, called "prongs" in this paper. The sender node uses erasure coding and splits each packet into multiple fragments and transmits the fragments over multiple parallel paths. The erasure coding allows the sink to reconstruct the original packet even if some of the fragments are lost. Occasionally, the sink broadcasts a query to awaken the sensors and to allow them to collect information about probability of packet loss and energy consumption in the network. The awakened sensors then use the collected information to distribute their data among different prongs so as to maximize the network lifetime, while keeping reliability in the network above a certain level