ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on fault tolerance techniques proposed in the network protocol stack to handle potential faults that can disrupt data communication in an industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSN). It discusses the fault tolerance mechanisms for managing network faults in three major IWSN standards: ZigBee, WirelessHART, and ISA 100. A resilient IWSN system must be able to perform two basic functions, fault detection and fault recovery. ZigBee provides wireless communication and networking solution for low data rate and low power consumption applications such as home and industrial automation. The chapter reviews several promising approaches for fault tolerant, cluster-tree based IWSN design. In a cluster tree network, using cluster heads to route data through multi-hop paths, one of the best approaches for fault tolerant routing is to have redundant paths between each source-destination pair of nodes.