Fault-tolerant and energy efficient wireless sensor networks: a cross-layer approach

In wireless sensor networks, fault-tolerant and energy efficiency are two important topics. Some link failures may happen during data transmission. In this paper, we propose a fault-tolerant and energy efficient multipath-routing (FEEM) scheme aided with channel coding and interleaver, which is a cross-layer design approach. For multipath selection, we propose an energy and mobility-aware geographical multipath routing (EM-GMR) scheme, which is based on fuzzy logic system considering the remaining battery capacity, mobility, and distance to the destination node. Simulation results show that our EM-GMR scheme can extend the network lifetime longer than the original geographical routing scheme which only considers distance to the destination location, and this scheme can reduce the frame loss rate and link failure rate since mobility is considered. We demonstrate that even if certain paths have failures, our FEEM scheme is still able to recover the transmitted message from failure with very low bit error rate and frame error rate.