In-network fault tolerance in networked sensor systems

Abstract

Networked sensor systems (NSS) have the potential of significantly enhancing our ability to monitor and interact with our physical environment. For example, numerous tiny sensors may be spread all over a forest to reveal the forest's life and events in detail along the time-space continuum. Critical to the success of NSS is the reliable collection and dissemination of data while conserving sensors' limited resources, in particular energy. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme that provides fault-tolerant data collection and dissemination through data checkpointing and recovery. We assume that the data is periodically reported from a sink node to the end users. Based on a model-based simulation, we show that our scheme is highly resilient to sensor and sink failure. It also leads to enhanced NSS lifetime and data collection with minimal overhead. Copyright 2006 ACM.