A Fault-tolerant Multipath Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

As the need for applying wireless sensors to military and civil applications increases, the design of a reliable routing protocol that provides robustness and scalability becomes an important issue in wireless sensor networks. Previously proposed approaches were concentrated on only power failures and crash faults. This paper describes a routing scheme that not only handles crash failures but data processing errors and patterned faults. The fault-tolerant protocol can locally repair broken paths without invoking networkwide route discovery to tolerate failures. The techniques of multipath routing and majority voting are utilized to overcome data processing faults and to increase the reliability of data delivery. The experimental results show that the protocol can efficiently detect and correct errors with limited execution overhead.