A distributed fault-tolerant clustering algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Energy is the main constraint of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) due to irreplaceable and limited power sources of the sensor nodes. Clustering is the most popular topology control method to reduce energy consumption and improve scalability of WSNs. However, in a cluster based WSN, cluster heads (CHs) consume more energy due to extra work load owing to data collection, data aggregation and their communication to the base station. Therefore, efficient cluster formation is very challenging by considering the energy consumption of the CHs. This is also complimented with the fault tolerant issue of WSNs as the sensor nodes are prone to failure. In this paper, we propose a distributed fault-tolerant clustering algorithm called DFCA which uses a cost function of the CHs for the formation of cluster. We also present a distributed run time recovery of the sensor nodes from the faulty cluster due to sudden failure of the CH. The experimental results demonstrate the strength of the proposed algorithm.