Self-Managed Fault Management in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks usually deploy in the harsh operational environment where the physical presence of human administrators is impractical. Applications and systems of these networks are thus expected to operate with the minimum aid or supervision. Biologically-inspired behaviors, such as self-healing, self-adaptation, have already been recognized as the desirable features for these systems to self-adapt to various unpredicted changes occurred in the environment. In this paper, we address such biological feature in terms of fault management. We propose a hierarchical structure to properly distribute fault management tasks among sensor nodes by introducing more dasiaself-managingpsila functions. In addition, we also consider an alternate solution to self-reconfigure fault management function of sensor nodes adapting to various system requirements, such as replacement of a faulty node.