Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a group of spatially dispersed and dedicated sensors for monitoring the physical or environmental parameters and communicating the collected data to a central base station through wireless links. Each sensor node consists of a sensor, microcomputer, transceiver and power source. The gathered data is forwarded through multiple nodes to the central base station. This requirement demands deploying number of nodes in the hostile environment, which might lead to the malfunction or failure of nodes due to power depletion, environmental impacts, radio intrusion, asymmetric communication links, and interruption of sensor nodes. Hence, fault tolerance is one of the critical issues in WSN’s. The recent developments in WSN have led to considerable improvements in protocols and fault tolerant mechanisms that are proposed to achieve higher data reliability, accuracy, energy saving, enhance network lifetime and minimize failure of components. This paper discusses and analyses the various fault tolerance mechanisms to identify the strength and weakness of these methods with prime focus on centralized and distributed network environments.

Wireless sensor network, fault tolerance, energy efficiency, centralized network, distributed network

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