Fault-Tolerance Mechanisms for Zigbee Wireless Sensor Networks

The IEEE 802.15.4/Zigbee protocol stack has been considered as a promising technology for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Fault-tolerance is one of the main issues in WSNs since it becomes critical in real deployment environments where reliability and reduced inaccessibility times are important. However, the Zigbee protocol is currently lacking efficient fault-tolerance mechanisms for supporting reliability for real-time applications. This paper analyzes common problems associated to ZigBee cluster-tree networks and proposes fault-tolerance mechanisms for those topologies. In this work in progress, the authors introduce two different fault-tolerance approaches, a reactive and a proactive mechanism and present some implementation guidelines for integrating these add-ons to Zigbee.