Soft fault detection using an improved mechanism in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are composed of a large number of inexpensive and tiny sensors used in different areas including military, industry, agriculture, space, and environment. Fault tolerance, which is considered a challenging task in these networks, is defined as the ability of the system to offer an appropriate level of functionality in the event of failures. The present study proposed an intelligent throughput descent and distributed energy-efficient mechanism in order to improve fault tolerance of the system against soft and permanent faults. This mechanism includes determining the intelligent neighborhood radius threshold, the intelligent neighborhood nodes number threshold, customizing the base paper algorithm for distributed systems, redefining the base paper scenarios for failure detection procedure to predict network behavior when running into soft and permanent faults, and some cases have been described for handling failure exception procedures. The experimental results from simulation indicate that the proposed mechanism was able to improve network throughput, fault detection accuracy, reliability, and network lifetime with respect to the base paper.