Performance analysis of dual-homed fault-tolerant routing in wireless sensor networks

One of the fundamental purpose of sensing information is to immediately respond to any anomalies. In order to make an accurate and cognizant decision, there is a great need for a fault-tolerant wireless sensor network. In this paper, we evaluate two categories of dual-homed routing for providing fault-tolerance in wireless sensor networks, namely dedicated dual-homed routing and shared dual-homed routing. We investigate two dedicated dual-homed routing techniques, namely 1+1 dual-homed routing and 1:1 dual-homed routing. We also develop shared dual-homed routing techniques, namely 1:2 dual-homed routing and 1:4 dual-homed routing. This paper investigates each technique's capability for providing fault-tolerance and its performance in terms of network lifetime, packet loss probability, end-to-end packet delay, and average throughput. Such an investigation will provide a comprehensive understanding about each proposed fault-tolerant technique. This will provide valuable insight for providing grade-of-protection in multi-layer wireless sensor networks by applying different techniques at different layers. ©2008 IEEE.