Design and Implementation of Dead Nodes Recovery Algorithm to Improve the Life Time of a Wireless Sensor Network

Sensors in a wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are having tendency to fail, due to the energy depletion, hardware failures, environmental conditions etc. Fault tolerance is one of the critical issues in WSNs. The existing fault tolerance mechanisms either consume significant extra energy to detect and recover from the failures or need to use additional hardware and software resources. This paper proposes a fault node recovery algorithm to enhance the lifetime of a wireless sensor network when some of the sensor nodes shut down. The algorithm is based on the grade diffusion algorithm combined with the genetic algorithm. The algorithm can result in fewer replacements of sensor nodes and more reused routing paths. In our simulation, the proposed algorithm increases the number of active nodes up to 8.7 times, reduces the rate of data loss by approximately 98.8 %, and reduces the rate of energy consumption by approximately 31.1 %.