FT-TSTP: A Multi-Gateway Fully Reactive Geographical Routing Protocol to Improve WSN Reliability

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) constitute the communication backbone for many modern cyber-physical systems (CPS). Fault-tolerance is a mandatory requirement under several CPS domains. This paper addresses an important aspect to increase the dependability of WSN, describing and evaluating a protocol that uses multiple redundant gateways and fully reactive geographic routing, able to deliver messages to all gateways and handling voids natively. Through simulations, it is shown that the delivery rates of the WSN will remain high even in the presence of voids that compromise the delivering of messages when using a single gateway. In conjunction with other fault tolerance methods, like agreement or voting protocols and hardware/software diversity, the proposed protocol provides mechanisms to build more reliable WSN.