Abstract—Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have the potentialof significantly enhancing our ability to monitor andinteract with our physical environment. Realizing a faulttolerantoperation is critical to the success of WSNs. Themain challenge is providing fault tolerance (FT) while conservingthe limited resources of the network. Many schemeshave been proposed in this area. Our main contributionin this paper is to propose a general framework for faulttolerance in WSNs. The proposed framework can be usedto guide the design and development of FT solutions and toevaluate existing ones. We present a comparative study ofthe existing schemes and identify potential enhancements.A primary module of the framework is the learning andrefinement module which enables a FT solution to be adaptiveand self-configurable based on changes in the networkconditions. We view this as vital to the resource-constrainedand highly dynamic WSNs. Up to our knowledge, we arethe first to propose the implementation of such module inFT solutions for WSNs.

Index Terms—Networked sensor systems, Fault tolerance,Checkpoint/Restart

Cite: Iman Salehy, Mohamed Eltoweissyy, Adnan Agbariax, and Hesham El-Sayed, "A Fault Tolerance Management Framework for Wireless Sensor Networks," Journal of Communications, vol. 2, no. 4, pp. 38-48, 2007.