Method For Fault Management With RPL Protocol in WSNs

One of the main research challenges regarding Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is the fault and failure management. The network should be able to detect faults and reacts more quickly to this anomaly and ensure the continuity of service monitoring. On the other hand, with the RPL (IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks), a link or neighboring node failure is detected and the repair mechanism is triggered. The repair technique for RPL is costly in terms of energy consumption, cost of additional control traffic by the effect of rebuilds in a tree forced by node failures. In addition, RPL was originally designed for static networks, with no support for mobility. However, handling the repair mechanism for the RPL with mobile nodes is a real challenge. Simultaneous to replace nodes failures by the mobility of their predecessor without rebuild of the RPL tree, is a proposed solution to estimate the ensure continuity of service for collect and transmit data in the monitored environment. In this paper, we propose an effective new method for Fault Management with RPL protocol (MFM-RPL) in WSN. Our work is the first effort for fault and failure management using the RPL protocol with mobile nodes. We use the Contiki operating system and COOJA simulator. The performance of MFM-RPL algorithm is evaluated for different network settings, in terms of, the control traffic, latency, energy consumption and PDR (%). Based on our new method, we offer a few suggestions for MFM-RPL implemented in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks applications (VANETs).