Energy Efficient Fault-tolerant Routing in Grid Based Wireless Sensor Network

A wireless sensor network is made up of tiny size sensor nodes having the limited computation capability, bandwidth, power supply and storage. These networks are generally deployed in inaccessible tough terrains and hence network failures either due to physical damage or energy depletion are quite inevitable. Also, in the absence of manual intervention, these networks must operate autonomously for which the network must have auto-configuration and self healing capability. In this paper, we propose an Energy Efficient Fault-tolerant Routing (EEFR) in grid based wireless sensor network, which is a node failure detection and recovery strategy. This scheme organizes the randomly deployed sensor nodes into clusters of suitable size cells by constructing a virtual grid over entire sensor field, where grid nodes also perform the data aggregation to eliminate the redundant data. One of the other main reasons for constructing a grid structure is to handle the network topology of the network that is changing dynamically due to node failure. The Grid Nodes (GNs) are used to forward the data from source to sink. Each grid node creates a local zone comprising some sensor nodes that can act as representative of GN when it fails. In this scheme, the shortest path is used for main data delivery and when a GN fails, an alternate node with maximum residual energy within local zone is selected as new GN. The simulation study reveals significant improvement in term of fault tolerance and energy conservation in comparison to existing schemes.