Scalable design of fault-Tolerance for wireless sensor networks

Murat Demirbas

Department of Computer and Information Science, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210, USA

PhD Dissertation, 2004
The Ohio State University

Abstract. Since wireless sensor networks 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. To achieve scalability of self-healing, in this dissertation we focus on addressing (1) the scalability of the cost-overhead of self-healing with respect to the size of the network, and (2) the scalability of the design effort for self-healing with respect to the size of the application software.

Our research on fault-containment addresses the first problem: By confining the contamination of faults within a small area, this approach achieves healing within work and time proportional to the size of the perturbation, independent of the size of the network. Our research on specification-based design of self-healing addresses the second problem: Since specifications are more succinct than implementations, this approach yields efficient design of self-healing even for large implementations. These two research directions are complementary, and together enable a scalable design of local self-healing for large-scale sensor network applications.

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