Optimal fault-tolerant placement of relay nodes in a mission critical wireless network

The operations of many critical infrastructures (e.g., airports) heavily depend on proper functioning of the radio communication network supporting operations. As a result, such a communication network is indeed a mission-critical communication network that needs adequate protection from external electromagnetic interferences. This is usually done through radiogoniometers. Basically, by using at least three suitably deployed radiogoniometers and a gateway gathering information from them, sources of electromagnetic emissions that are not supposed to be present in the monitored area can be localised. Typically, relay nodes are used to connect radiogoniometers to the gateway. As a result, some degree of fault-tolerance for the network of relay nodes is essential in order to offer a reliable monitoring. On the other hand, deployment of relay nodes is typically quite expensive. As a result, we have two conflicting requirements: minimise costs while guaranteeing a given fault-tolerance. In this paper address the problem of computing a deployment for relay nodes that minimises the relay node network cost while at the same time guaranteeing proper working of the network even when some of the relay nodes (up to a given maximum number) become faulty (fault-tolerance). We show that the above problem can be formulated as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) as well as a Pseudo-Boolean Satisfiability (PB-SAT) optimisation problem and present experimental results com- paring the two approaches on realistic scenarios

Resilient Wireless Sensor Networks Using Topology Control: A Review

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) may be deployed in failure-prone environments, and WSNs nodes easily fail due to unreliable wireless connections, malicious attacks and resource-constrained features. Nevertheless, if WSNs can tolerate at most losing k − 1 nodes while the rest of nodes remain connected, the network is called k − connected. k is one of the most important indicators for WSNs’ self-healing capability. Following a WSN design flow, this paper surveys resilience issues from the topology control and multi-path routing point of view. This paper provides a discussion on transmission and failure models, which have an important impact on research results. Afterwards, this paper reviews theoretical results and representative topology control approaches to guarantee WSNs to be k − connected at three different network deployment stages: pre-deployment, post-deployment and re-deployment. Multi-path routing protocols are discussed, and many NP-complete or NP-hard problems regarding topology control are identified. The challenging open issues are discussed at the end. This paper can serve as a guideline to design resilient WSNs

ON RELAY NODE PLACEMENT PROBLEM FOR SURVIVABLE WIRELESS SENSOR NETWORKS

Wireless sensor networks are widely applied to many fields such as animal habitat monitoring, air traffic control, and health monitoring. One of the current problems with wireless sensor networks is the ability to overcome communication failures due to hardware failure, distributing sensors in an uneven geographic area, or unexpected obstacles between sensors. One common solution to overcome this problem is to place a minimum number of relay nodes among sensors so that the communication among sensors is guaranteed. This is called Relay Node Placement Problem (RNP). This problem has been proved as NP-hard for a simple connected graph. Therefore, many algorithms have been developed based on Steiner graphs. Since RNP for a connected graph is NP-hard, the RNP for a survivable network has been conjectured as NP-hard and the algorithms for a survivable network have also been developed based on Steiner graphs. In this study, we show the new approximation bound for the survivable wireless sensor networks using the Steiner graphs based algorithm. We prove that the approximation bound is guaranteed in an environment where some obstacles are laid, and also propose the newly developed algorithm which places fewer relay nodes than the existing algorithms. Consequently, the main purpose of this study is to find the minimum number of relay nodes in order to meet the survivability requirements of wireless sensor networks

Mobile sink based fault diagnosis scheme for wireless sensor networks

Network diagnosis in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a difficult task due to their improvisational nature, invisibility of internal running status, and particularly since the network structure can frequently change due to link failure. To solve this problem, we propose a Mobile Sink (MS) based distributed fault diagnosis algorithm for WSNs. An MS, or mobile fault detector is usually a mobile robot or vehicle equipped with a wireless transceiver that performs the task of a mobile base station while also diagnosing the hardware and software status of deployed network sensors. Our MS mobile fault detector moves through the network area polling each static sensor node to diagnose the hardware and software status of nearby sensor nodes using only single hop communication. Therefore, the fault detection accuracy and functionality of the network is significantly increased. In order to maintain an excellent Quality of Service (QoS), we employ an optimal fault diagnosis tour planning algorithm. In addition to saving energy and time, the tour planning algorithm excludes faulty sensor nodes from the next diagnosis tour. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms through simulation and real life experimental results

Design of Three-Tiered Sensor Networks with a Mobile Data Collector under Energy and Buffer Constraints

A sensor network consists of a network with a large number of sensor nodes deployed around some phenomenon to gather information. Since the nature of sensor nodes is that their energy is limited, many techniques focus on addressing the problem of minimizing the energy consumption in order to extend the network lifetime. One approach is to deploy relay nodes. However, the requirement to transmit over large distances leads to a high rate of energy dissipation. Therefore, mobile data collectors are introduced to resolve this problem. In this thesis, we present an Integer Linear Programming formulation that takes different parameters into consideration to determine an optimal relay node placement scheme in networks with a mobile data collector, which ensures that there is no data loss and the energy dissipation does not exceed a specified level. The simulation results show that our formulation can significantly extend the network lifetime and provide Quality of Service

FDMG: Fault detection method by using genetic algorithm in clustered wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of sensor nodes which are capable of sensing different environmental phenomena and sending the collected data to the base station or Sink. Since sensor nodes are made of cheap components and are deployed in remote and uncontrolled environments, they are prone to failure; thus, maintaining a network with its proper functions even when undesired events occur is necessary which is called fault tolerance. Hence, fault management is essential in these networks. In this paper, a new method has been proposed with particular attention to fault tolerance and fault detection in WSN. The performance of the proposed method was simulated in MATLAB. The proposed method was based on majority vote which can detect permanently faulty sensor nodes with high detection. Accuracy and low false alarm rate were excluded them from the network. To investigate the efficiency of the new method, the researchers compared it with Chen, Lee, and hybrid algorithms. Simulation results indicated that the novel proposed method has better performance in parameters such as detection accuracy (DA) and a false alarm rate (FAR) even with a large set of faulty sensor nodes