Clinic: A Service Oriented Approach for Fault Tolerance in Wireless Sensor Networks

With the size and complexity of modern Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) systems, a system's ability to recover from faults is becoming more important. A self-healing system is one that has the capability to recover from faults without human intervention during execution. Since WSNs are inherently fault-prone and since their on-site maintenance is infeasible, scalable self-healing is crucial for enabling the deployment of large-scale sensor network applications. Previous work has typically dealt with single faults in isolation, has imposed constraints on systems, or required new protocol elements. In this paper, we attempt to solve some of these problems through the use of service-oriented architecture. We propose a service-oriented self-healing approach, called “Clinic”, that works with existing network components, e.g. routing protocols, and resources without adding extra overhead on the network. In Clinic, different network capabilities are viewed as services of the network instead of being isolated capabilities of individual nodes. This view of the network promotes collaboration among nodes and information reuse by sharing information collected by one service with other network services. Preliminary evaluation showed that Clinic achieved fault tolerance while keeping low communication overhead by reusing only the information collected by other network services to heal from faults.