ABSTRACT
In many applications, sensor nodes are deployed in hostile or harsh environments. Therefore, these sensor nodes are susceptible to failure due to several factors, including complete depletion of battery power, malfunctioning of hardware components (such as processing unit, transceiver, etc) or destruction by an external event. The failure of sensor nodes makes some parts of the target region uncovered and thus creates network partitioning. Therefore, it affects the overall network lifetime and degrades the performance of the network. However, the failure of single or some sensor nodes may not affect the overall performance of the network as the wireless sensor network (WSN) is intended to gather information from a group of sensor nodes rather than a single or some sensor nodes. Therefore, in order to continue functionality of the WSNs, the clustering and routing algorithms should cope with fault tolerant aspect, especially when some CHs fail to work. The chapter presents a distributed fault-tolerant clustering and routing (DFCR) algorithm.
