Fault Tolerant Techniques for Wireless Sensor
Network- A Comprehensive Survey
Shyama M
Department of Electrical and Electronics
Engineering
Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India
shyamaanish@gmail.com
Abstract - Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has
become a part of our daily life with lots of future
expectations, especially in the area like defense, health,
agriculture and many more. This boundless expectation
forces the network to become more reliable. The scope of
a WSN lies mainly in monitoring and controlling a
remote, unattended or hazardous area for a long time.
Only a fault-tolerant system can assure a long time
reliable service. In this paper, an overview of wireless
sensor net-works is presented, with comprehensive
analysis on fault tolerant WSN. This paper discusses the
basic architecture of a wireless sensor network and ex-
amines the need of developing a fault tolerant wireless
sensor and various strategies to attain the same.
I. INTRODUCTION
Wireless Sensor Network is a self-configured and
self-organized network which connects a large number
of autonomous sensors. The modern trend which
demands autonomous systems in each and every
application made the role of WSN more important and
inevitable. WSN consists of hundreds or sometimes
thousands of low-cost, low-powered small size sensor
nodes with processing capability. A base station is the
one which will make decisions according to the data
sent by sensors. All the communications in a WSN
system are wireless. Since the WSNs are mainly for
re-mote or hazardous applications, the main
challenges they are facing are energy conservation and
maintaining network life time. The only solution to
face these challenges is a Fault tolerant WSN which
will detect and recover a fault and will continue its
service even after the occurrence of a fault. This paper
presents a comprehensive survey on WSN
characteristics, its architecture and discusses about
fault tolerant techniques for wireless sensor networks.
II. CHARACTERISTICS AND APPLICATIONS OF
WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS
WSN is a type of ad-hoc network with lots of
differences from the traditional networks [9]. A
traditional network is mainly designed for general
purpose applications while, wire-less sensor networks
are application specific. The main constraint of such
network is energy; where network performance takes
Dr. Anju S Pillai
Department of Electrical and Electronics
Engineering
Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, India
s_anju@cb.amrita.edu
that role in traditional networks. Since it is a type of
ad-hoc, the networking is often unplanned. Unlike
other networks, WSN networks often operate in harsh
environments and hence manual accessing is not a
regular procedure. Wireless sensor networks must be
highly fault tolerant when com-pared to others.
Even though WSNs are a type of ad-hoc networks,
there are some differences be-tween them. WSNs
mainly use broadcasting whereas, ad-hoc use point-to-
point communication. WSNs are limited with sensors
having constrained power, processing capability and
storage. Also, these sensors are not provided by any
global Ids.
III. ARCHITECTURE OF A WIRELESS SENSOR
NETWORK
Wireless sensor network architecture mainly
consists of five layers similar to OSI reference model.
These layers are Application, Transport, Network,
Data link and Physical Layer. It also includes three
cross layers: power management, mobility
management and task management [15-17]. Figure 1
shows the basic architecture of a WSN.
Fig. 1. Basic architecture of wireless sensor network [15, 16].
• Application layer is for user interface. It is
responsible for displaying the received data to the user
with the help of lots of application programs.
• Transport layer is used when WSN is
accessed through the internet or some other networks.
This layer controls the data flow in the network.
 • Network layer is responsible for routing the Communication between sensor nodes is the main
data. The transport layer will hand over the data to cause of power consumption.
network layer for routing.
• Data link layer is mainly for accessing the
required medium and error control. This layer ensures
the end-to-end communication of the network.
• Physical layer is for generating a frequency,
selecting the carrier frequency, signal detection,
modulation, data encryption etc. for interfacing the
bits with a physical medium.

The cross-layer planes are mainly for network

management. Since a WSN contains hundreds of
sensor nodes, these nodes need to coordinate and work
together for better performance of the network. Cross-
layer planes do this with the support of five OSI layers.
• Power management plane is responsible for
the management of a sensor node for sensing,
processing and communication.
• Connection management plane is responsible
for network connectivity. The con-figuration and re-
configuration of sensor nodes is essential to establish
and maintain the connectivity.
• Task management plane is responsible for
managing the distribution of tasks among the nodes.
This task distribution will improve the energy
efficiency and network lifetime.
Since WSNs are mainly meant for remote sensing
of physical parameters, it should contain lots of
sensing nodes distributed near the target and sink
nodes or base stations for collecting these data from
target nodes and also to forward it to the server.
A. Architecture of a Sensing Node
A node or basically a sensing node consists of four
subsystems: sensing system, processing system,
communication system and power system [4, 14, 15]
[17-19]. Figure 7 shows the basic architecture of a
node.
The sensing system includes low-cost, low-
power, small size sensors which can convert the
physical parameters like temperature, humidity, light,
pressure, motion, sound, vibration etc. to digital.
Processing system is mainly for processing the
sensed data and also for controlling the sensor node.
Since a WSN requires low-power, small size and low-
cost devices, mostly microcontrollers are preferred.
Communication system includes a transceiver
that is for transmission and reception. The wireless
communication medium can be optical, IR or RF.
Power supply is one of the main constraints in
WSN. Since WSN is mainly used in unattended
environments, battery changing or manual recharging
is not possible. So, while designing a WSN, low power
devises and energy saving topologies are considered.
Fig. 2. Block diagram of a sensor node.
B. Architecture of a Sink Node
Sink nodes or base stations also are sensing nodes
with extra computational power, extra memory and
extra battery charge. The base station consists of a
gateway node, base station software and a host
computer. The gateway node helps to communicate
between WSN and the server/user or other networks.
Base stations have to collect data from sensor nodes,
store it, process it, analyze it and also forward it to a
server [20].
C. Communication System
Fig. 3. Basic WSN communication architecture.
A Wireless sensor networks consist of hundreds
of sensing nodes, sink node/base stations and a
communication system. Sensor nodes communicate
with each other as well as with base stations using a
wireless medium. Some of the commonly used wire-
less technologies are RFID, WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigbee
etc. The sensor node monitors the physical
environment or target. The processed data will be send
to the base stations. The transmission can be single-
hop or multi-hop. The base station will act as a gate-
way node between the wireless and the external world
which can be of any wired medium, Ethernet etc. The
user or server can access the WSN through this base
station. The communication network in WSN is a type
of ad-hoc network. Figure 3 shows the basic
architecture of a WSN communication system [20,
21].
IV. FAULT TOLERANCE IN WIRELESS SENSOR
NETWORKS
Fault tolerance is the characteristics of a system
which will help to continue its service even after the
occurrence of a fault. Since WSNs are mostly
deployed in hazardous or remote areas, a manual fault
detection and correction is not possible every time. For
increasing the network life time, a WSN system must
be fault tolerant. The system itself should detect,
recover and prevent from faults. The fault tolerance
should start from the design phase itself. A developer
must foresee the possible faults that can be affect a
WSN system. It can be from the environment, through
the transmission line, due to energy insufficiency,
hardware or software faults etc. After detecting a fault,
the system must react to it with in no time for making
the network available to the user even after the
presence of the fault. The responsibility of a fault
tolerant system is to make the system available,
dependable and reliable to the users without
considering the effect of a fault. According to the
requirement and situation, different types of fault
tolerant techniques have been developed. The
following section briefs the idea about the fault
tolerant techniques classifications.
A. Fault tolerant techniques
A single fault tolerant technique may not be able
to meet all the requirements of a WSN system. So
different types of techniques have been found for
different applications in WSNs [22-24]. Figure 4
shown below summarizes fault tolerant techniques.
Fault tolerant techniques classification according
to different criteria is explained below.
1) Time criteria: At what time the technique
applied is the main consideration of this criterion.
They are preventive and curative [22].
Preventive - A preventive technique is used to
prevent a failure by implementing an alternative for
the failed service. It can be at node level and at
network level.
Curative - Their role starts when an error is
noticed. They try to recover the system usually by
applying redundancy techniques.
2) Main objective: The main objective of a fault
tolerance mechanism while applying is the main
consideration of this criterion. There can be of four
main classifications [22].
Energy/power management - As the name
implies, it is for enhancing the energy efficiency of a
system and reducing energy depletion. This can be at
MAC level and network level
Flow management - This type of technique is
taken care of data flow through the network by finding
reliable routs and base station for establishing the best
path be-tween nodes. This include concurrent path
method in which multiple paths can be utilized
concurrently and alternative path method in which
only one path is used from the multiple links. Others
are chosen at the time of failure of current path.
Data management - In this, data size and
information quality are the main consideration. Data
transmission which is the main reason of energy
consumption, has to be reduced without affecting the
information quality. It can be achieved by aggregation,
compression and storage.
Coverage/connectivity management - Coverage
and connectivity enhancement is the main objective of
this technique. Node placement, sleep scheduling and
node relocation are the methods used in this technique.
Time Curative
preventive
Flow management
Objective
Data management
Coverage/connectivity
management
Size
For small scale
For large scale
Implementation Redundancy based
method
Clustering based
Deployment based
Fault region Link based
Node based
Malfunction nodes
Fig. 4. Summary of fault tolerant techniques.
3) Size: The size of a network is the main
consideration [22]. Mostly a small-scale technique is
not suitable for a large-scale.
Small-scale WSN - Since each and every node in
a small scale WSN plays an important role, failure of
one will affect the whole network performance.
Large-scale WSN - The thousands of nodes are
managed by dividing it to small clusters having nodes
with similar duty. So that, failure of a node in any
cluster will not affect the entire network.
4) Implementation method: A technique can
be implement using different methods. This criterion
is based on that differences. The popular methods are
given below [23].
Redundancy based - If energy, security and
reliability are considering as the main constraints, then
any of the redundancy methods from node
redundancy, path redundancy, data redundancy and
time redundancy is the best method to choose.
Clustering based - Scalability and controllability
is the main advantage of this method. Since this
method is energy efficient, it is considering as most
efficient than the other two. Clustering techniques can
be done as single hop, multi hop and hierarchical
methods.
Deployment based - While considering the
development of a WSN, the node location also is a
main factor. A topology should be there to identify the
dislocation of a node. Techniques which give priority
for node location also will prefer this meth-od.
Fault region - A fault can be occurred at different
locations like node, link etc. The fault tolerant
technique used for one may not be applicable for
another. So, the selection of a technique should
consider the chances of fault at different location also
[24].
Link based - The main aim of this type of
protocols is to re-establish the faulty link between two
nodes. It can be hierarchical and data-centric.
Node based - A node become faulty due to several
reasons like power failure, hardware problem,
environment etc. According to the nature of the
failure, this technique can be done as multi trees
aggregation, topology management and tolerating
multi node failures.
Malfunction nodes - A faulty node will not send
any data so that it is easy to identify. But a malfunction
node may send incorrect data or unnecessary data
which is very difficult to identify and also will make
erroneous outputs.
V. CONCLUSION
Wireless sensor networks play an important role
in making an autonomous, predictable and accurate
Hi-tech world. Achieving a completely fault tolerant
WSNs is the main goal of most of the researchers in
this field. Fault tolerance of a system mainly depends
on the characteristics and architecture of the system.
So, wireless sensor network’s basic characteristics,
architectural specialties and classifications are
presented for an initial understanding. This paper
highlights the fault tolerant techniques to be adopted
to develop a reliable and dependable wireless sensor
networks.
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