FTDE: Distributed Fault Tolerance for WSN Data Collection and Compression Schemes

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), being power and communication capacity constrained, often employ data compression schemes to reduce the data volumes. At the same time, various factors, such as low node reliability and communication faults, can compromise the core objective of accurate collection and delivery of the sensor data. However, contemporary compression schemes often fail to consider operational faults, and the resulting data errors arising from low node reliability (node crashes), and communication faults (data and links corruption) result in erroneous data being collected. This paper proposes a novel model-based fault-tolerance technique applicable to varied compression schemes. Being fully distributed, our scheme corrects data errors at the point of origin (faulty sensor nodes), and thus avoids costly transmissions of corrupt data, decreasing message cost, and enhances compression effectiveness by correcting the erroneous samples.