Fault Tolerant Clustering Approaches in Wireless Sensor Network for Landslide Area Monitoring

The installation or deployment of a wireless sensor network (WSN) in a real world application is prone to innumerable failures such as software or hardware malfunctioning, environmental hazards, radio interference, battery exhaustion, etc. In a safety critical application such as landslide prediction, fault tolerant approaches have to be followed to ensure the availability of sensor data at the analysis station during a critical situation. We propose a fault tolerant and energy efficient clustering approach which organizes the whole network into smaller cluster and subcluster groups enabling a considerable reduction of communication and processing overhead. Subcluster formation also gives the possibility to skillfully deal with sensor nodes, node leader, and cluster head failures. We also propose a fault tolerant approach that uses a matrix based error approximation method for providing the approximate sensor data of the failed node. The approximate code prediction takes into consideration various geological aspects of the problem.