Effective fault detection and routing scheme for wireless sensor networks

[Display omitted] •An energy efficient fault detection and data routing scheme (EFDR) is proposed for sensor nodes hardware.•Cellular automata (CA) rules have been employed for sensor node and network management.•The proposed scheme reuses the faulty sensor nodes in order to improve the network performances.•The proposed method uses vector based fault detection model for sensor circuit fault identification.•The performance of the EFDR is better in terms of network coverage, network life time and energy consumption. In a wireless sensor network (WSN), random occurrences of faulty nodes degrade the quality of service of the network. In this paper, we propose an efficient fault detection and routing (EFDR) scheme to manage a large size WSN. The faulty nodes are detected by neighbour node’s temporal and spatial correlation of sensing information and heart beat message passed by the cluster head. In EFDR scheme, three linear cellular automata (CA) are used to manage transmitter circuit/ battery condition/microcontroller fault, receiver circuit fault and sensor circuit fault representation. On the other hand, L-system rules based data routing scheme is proposed to determine optimal routing path between cluster head and base station. The proposed EFDR technique is capable of detecting and managing the faulty nodes in an efficient manner. The simulation results show 86% improvement in the rate of energy loss compared to an existing algorithm.