Efficient Fault-Tolerant Routing in IoT Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Bipartite-Flow Graph Modeling

In the Internet of Things (IoT), a wireless sensor network (WSN) is deployed for collecting the interesting data of an application field. Sensor nodes in an IoT WSN are usually with the heterogeneous property. Some nodes have more power (energy) and additional functionality (e.g., data aggregation) than others. Cluster-based routing is usually used in WSNs for data transmissions due to efficiently routing consideration. Based on cluster-based routing, the cluster heads (CHs) act as the sensed data forwarding role. Once one or more CHs fail, the faulty CHs cannot forward the sensed data of their serving sensor nodes. As a result, the sink node (gateway) has not sufficient sensed data of the IoT application field. This will deeply affect the information processing of the IoT applications. We utilize the virtual CH formation and flow graph modeling to efficiently tolerate the failures of CHs. First, the available resources of all failure-free CHs are logically organized as a virtual CH to be the common backup of all faulty CHs. Then, the flow graph modeling is used to achieve fault tolerance with the minimum total energy consumption among all failure-free CHs. Finally, we perform extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in the fault-tolerant routing of the IoT WSNs.