A survey on fault tolerance in wireless sensor networks

The reliability of wireless sensor networks (WSN) is affected by faults that may occur due to various reasons such as malfunctioning hardware, software glitches, dislocation, or environmental hazards, e.g. fire or flood. A WSN that is not prepared to deal with such situations may suffer a reduction in overall lifetime, or lead to hazardous consequences in critical application contexts. One of the major fault recovery techniques is the exploitation of redundancy, which is often a default condition in WSNs. Another major approach is the involvement of base stations or other resourceful nodes to maintain operations after failures. In this paper we present a survey of approaches to fault tolerance and detection techniques in WSNs in both theoretical and application driven research. We provide a taxonomy of faults and classify the surveyed approaches according to their ability of detecting and recovering from faults.