Abstract
Maintaining prolonged service lifetime and adequate quality of sensing coverage are the key challenges
in constructing Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based applications. As such networks usually
operate in inhospitable and hostile environment, failures are ineludible and providing resilience is a necessity.
However, it is challenging to satisfy the conflicting problems of enhancing energy efficiency and
fault tolerance simultaneously. Fault-tolerance is a significant requirement while designing WSN. It is
crucial to detect the failures in advance and take necessary measures to maintain durable and efficient
functioning of the network. Generally, in the existing face structured WSNs, node faults and failures can
induce the formation of coverage holes, disrupt the face structure and consequently curtail the application
performance. The coverage quality will affect the monitoring effectiveness of tracking applications,
e.g., a moving target tracking. Moreover, node failures can cause the network to be partitioned, further
reducing the accuracy in tracking. In this paper, we propose a robust fault-tolerance scheme with coverage
preservation using a face structured WSN topology (FCAFT ). The key objective of the proposed
FCAFT scheme is to sustain the performance of the network by timely healing the faults in the network,
to enhance the durability and reliability of the WSN. The results of simulation and comparison with
existing methods reveal that FCAFT is efficacious in sustaining the coverage and enhancing the service
lifetime of WSN, which is a necessity for critical monitoring and tracking applications of WSNs.