Multi-Agent System for Fault Tolerance in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are self-organized networks that typically consist of thousands of low-cost, low-powered sensor nodes. The reliability and availability of WSNs can be affected by faults, including those from radio interference, battery exhaustion, hardware and software failures, communication link errors, malicious attacks, and so on. Thus, we propose a novel multi-agent fault tolerant system for wireless sensor networks. Since a major requirement of WSNs is to reduce energy consumption, we use multi-agent and mobile agent configurations to manage WSNs that provide energy-efficient services. Mobile agent architecture have inherent advantages in that they provide energy awareness, scalability, reliability, and extensibility. Our multi-agent system consists of a resource manager, a fault tolerance manager and a load balancing manager, and we also propose fault-tolerant protocols that use multi-agent and mobile agent setups.