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Fault-tolerant de-Bruijn graph based multipurpose architecture and routing

protocol for wireless sensor networks

Article  in  International Journal of Sensor Networks · August 2011

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2011.042199 · Source: DBLP

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160 Int. J. Sensor Networks, Vol. 10, No. 3, 2011

Fault-tolerant de-Bruijn graph based multipurpose

architecture and routing protocol for wireless
sensor networks

Vishram Mishra*, Jimson Mathew and

Dhiraj K. Pradhan
Department of Computer Science,
University of Bristol,
Merchant Venturers Building,
Woodland Road, Bristol, BS8 1UB, UK
Email: vishrammishra@gmail.com
Email: jimson@compsci.bristol.ac.uk
Email: pradhan@cs.bris.ac.uk
*Corresponding author

Abstract: As dense Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are increasingly vulnerable to fault,
network must continue processing data without affecting the faulty node. Fault aware routing is
an effective way to mitigate such a scenario. To this end, we present a de-Bruijn graph based
Multipurpose Architecture and Routing Protocol (MARP) which has all the properties of
an efficient WSN. The MARP supports multicast routing, broadcasting, fault detection and
efficient fault-tolerance. Its unique architecture makes it easily scalable and provides easy three-
dimensional to two-dimensional mapping. Furthermore, we show that, depending on the fault-
tolerance capability one wants, design requires higher redundancy. A small experiment of
de-Bruijn graph based routing protocol is also presented with mica2 motes to check its feasibility
in a real-life scenario.

Keywords: fault-tolerance; sensor network; multicast routing; broadcast routing; de-Bruijn

graph; routing protocol; scalable.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Mishra, V., Mathew, J. and Pradhan, D.K.
(2011) ‘Fault-tolerant de-Bruijn graph based multipurpose architecture and routing protocol for
wireless sensor networks’, Int. J. Sensor Networks, Vol. 10, No. 3, pp.160–175.

Biographical notes: Vishram Mishra received his BTech degree in Computer Science and
Engineering from Cochin University of Science and Technology in 2010. Currently he is a PhD
fellow at Emerging Research Labs, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research
interest includes QoS provisioning, cognitive radio and wireless sensor networks.

Jimson Mathew received the PhD degree in Computer Science from University of Bristol. He has
held positions with NUS Singapore, Lucent Technologies Australia and Royal Institute of
Technology, Stockholm. Since 2005 he has been with University of Bristol, UK. His research
interest includes cognitive radio, wireless sensor networks, fault-tolerance and logic synthesis.

Dhiraj K. Pradhan currently holds a Chair in Computer Science at the University of Bristol, UK.
Previous to this, he had held the Endowed Chair Professorship in Computer Science at Texas
A&M University. His research interest includes wireless sensor networks, computer architecture,
logic synthesis and computer architecture.

1 Introduction messages originated from other nodes in the sensor network

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a collection of
sensor nodes that are densely deployed in order to form a
collaborative network, and can be considered as a special
case of a broader type of wireless networks known as
ad-hoc wireless networks (Bae and Yoon, 2005). The role of
sensor nodes is to collect useful information about the
environment in which they are deployed and to route
(Kim et al., 2003; Virk et al., 2005). As the name implies,
wireless channels will be used by the sensor nodes in order
to communicate, bearing in mind that they have a limited
energy source battery power (Kim et al., 2003). Because
nodes in this type of networks are expected to operate in
environments such as non-intrusive and non-disruptive
monitoring of microclimates in remote areas (Mainwaring
et al., 2002), monitoring landfills, inventory tracking and

Copyright © 2011 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

 Fault-tolerant de-Bruijn graph based MARP for WSNs
control in warehouses and monitoring containers at ports, it
will be difficult to replace the energy source when the
energy depletes; hence they should be able to tolerate faults
for longer network lifetime (Manjeshwar and Agrawal,
2001).
As the energy depletes, sensor nodes will die and this
may result in the network to be unconnected and unable to
accomplish its mission. In addition there is a tremendous
need for fault-tolerant WSNs that are capable of providing
maximum coverage for sensing while consuming minimum
power. Also, the correctness of the sensed data must be
taken into account, as a node might be faulty but has enough
energy to stay active which results in providing erroneous
data. As wireless communication is considered to be the
major source that consumes a sensor nodes energy (Gedik
et al., 2007), mobile sinks have been introduced in order to
reduce the distance to which the sensor node needs to send
data as a result reducing the amount of energy consumed to
accomplish such a task. In addition to communication, there
are other sources that consume energy such as processing,
storage and sensing (Karl and Willig, 2005). Although the
amount of the energy consumed by these three sources is
small if compared to communication, finding a mechanism
to reduce the amount of energy they consume will help in
prolonging the network lifetime. Hsi-Lu and Chen-Lung
(2007) proposed a fault-tolerant routing protocol, called
Sensor On-demand Multi-path Distance Vector Reliable
(SOMDV-R) routing protocol, for WSNs to support reliable
data delivery. Instead of selecting a shortest path, SOMDV-R
takes into account both reliability demand and link quality
to determine the number of desired paths. Demand routing
protocol, Reliable Fault-Tolerant Multi-path (RFTM), to
improve the reliability of data routing in WSNs is presented
by Alwan and Agarwal (2010).
1.1 Contributions of this paper
In this paper, we propose a de-Bruijn graph based
Multipurpose Architecture and Routing Protocol (MARP)
which has all the properties of an efficient WSN. It gains
advantage over the previously developed architecture and
routing protocols by providing all the features of a WSN
such as multicast routing, broadcasting, fault detection and
efficient fault-tolerance. Its unique architecture makes it
easily scalable and provides easy three-dimensional mapping
to two-dimensional mapping. Thus, the architecture can be
used in any type of static environment. By static we mean that
the network is deployed statically with a known architecture
and the architecture does not change much with time. We
have proposed an energy efficient routing algorithm for the
multi-layered structure. The same algorithm can be used
in both three-dimensional and two-dimensional deployed
network. Our simulation results show that the latency and
energy consumption of the network are much less with
respect to the other structures. A small experiment of de-
Bruijn graph based routing protocol is also presented with
mica2 motes to check its feasibility in a real-life scenario.
161
The rest of this paper is organised as follows. Some of
the previous works are reviewed in Section 2. In Section 3,
we present some of the basic definitions and notations. In
Section 4, we present the de-Brujn graph based energy
efficient routing scheme in multi-layered architecture.
Section 5 presents the experimental results and conclusions
are drawn in Section 7.
2 Related work
Energy management is very important for WSNs, because
sensor nodes are driven by batteries and are severely energy
constrained. To make sensor networks energy efficient, many
techniques have been proposed such as those by Bhardwaj
et al. (2001). In addition, many issues that differ from the
well-studied centralised scenarios have been raised by the
distributed collaborative sensing mentioned by Brooks et al.
(2002). The problem of finding an energy efficient way which
a sensor network can use in order to prolong the lifetime of
the sensor network in a fault-tolerant manner has been the
subject of a lot of studies and research (Xu et al., 2001). A lot
of the previous researches have focused on grouping the
sensor nodes into different clusters using different clustering
algorithms and different ways to choose cluster heads, while
taking the energy efficiency into account. The research
proposed by Manjeshwar and Agrawal (2001) is based on
hierarchical clustering to group nodes. Moreover, it uses two
parameters (hard and soft thresholds) to control the energy
consumed in communication by each node.
Heinzelman et al. (2000) proposed a Low-Energy
Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) protocol. As the
name implies, this protocol uses a randomised rotation of the
cluster heads in order to distribute the energy consumption,
resulting from being a cluster head, between the sensor nodes
in the sensor network, because when a node becomes a
cluster head it will consume much more energy than the other
nodes (Heinzelman et al., 2000). Another research has taken
fault-tolerance into account, so that to achieve fault-tolerance
the sensor network is partitioned into distinct clusters and the
node that has a high energy is selected to be the cluster head
(Gupta and Younis, 2003). In addition, only the cluster
heads are allowed to communicate with the base station. To
achieve fault-tolerance, the cluster heads are capable of
communicating with each other and using a status update
messages, cluster heads can decide on whether a cluster head
is faulty or not, if they do not receive any status update
message form it for a period of time. Worth mentioning, the
decision whether a cluster head is faulty or not is taken
through consensus between cluster heads. To achieve this,
every cluster head has to send a periodic status updates
via the inter-gateway communication, in which the network
consisting of cluster heads (gateways) only. To reach
consensus, every cluster head has to broadcast every periodic
status update message it receives to all the other cluster heads
162 V. Mishra, J. Mathew and D.K. Pradhan
in its range. As a result, all cluster heads will have the same
information regarding the status of the system. Therefore, if
none of the cluster heads received a status update from a
particular cluster head, it can be concluded that it has failed.
After that, the type of the fault will be identified by parsing
the status update messages to identify the sensor nodes that
are not able to communicate with the cluster head because of
range faults in the cluster head. Finally, recovery will take
place reallocating the sensor nodes belonging to the faulty
cluster head to new clusters, if the original cluster head
was considered to be in a complete failure state (Gupta and
Younis, 2003).
3 Preliminaries
The network topology has a great impact on the
system performance and reliability. There are well-defined
relationships between the topology and the packet delay,
the routing algorithms, fault-tolerance and fault-diagnosis in
a network. For example, the packet delay may be directly
proportional to the inter-nodal distance; and the complexity of
the routing algorithm may be determined by the regularity
of the topology. The motivation behind this paper is to
investigate new topology for reliable and energy efficient
sensor network design. We need a topology in which the
routing protocol requires less routing information and thus
conserves energy and resources. A way to reduce the routing
information is to implement the network in the form of a
well-connected graph, which has a well-known path from
source to destination. The binary de-Bruijn graph (Pradhan
and Reddy, 1982; Samatham and Pradhan, 1989) exhibits this
property along with fault-tolerance and hence is considered in
this paper. The degree of a vertex is defined as the number of
edges incident on the vertex; while the degree of a graph is
defined as the maximum degree of any vertex in the graph.
The degree of this graph is bounded (i.e. the degree of the
network does not change with an increase in the size of
network). Thus, it allows an easy calculation of the path from
Figure 1 DB(2, 3) simple binary de Bruijn graph (see online version for colours)
source to destination node in the network. This graph also has
good properties such as small diameter and high connectivity.
The de-Bruijn graph denoted by DB(r, k) has N = rk
nodes with diameter k and degree 2r. This corresponds to the
state graph of a shift register of length k using r-ary digits. A
shift register changes a state by shifting in a digit in the state
number in one side, and then shifting out one digit from the
other side. If we represent a node by I = (ik−1ik−2, …, i1i0),
where i, j in {0, 1, … (r – 1)}, 0 ≤ j ≤ (k − 1), then its
neighbours are represented by ik−2ik−3, …, i0p and pik−1ik−2,…, i1,
where p in {0, 1, … (r–1)}. The DB(2, k), which is called
binary de-Bruijn graph, can be obtained as follows. If we
represent a node I by a k-bit binary number, say, I = Ik−1 Ik−2,
…, I1I0, then its neighbours can be represented as Ik−2, …,
I1I00, Ik−2, …, I1I01, 0Ik−1Ik−2, …, I1 and 1Ik−1Ik−2, …, I1. Since a
binary de-Bruijn requires representation of the nodes with
values 0 and 1 only, it simplifies the network architecture and
routing algorithm. Our network architecture is therefore based
on the binary de-Bruijn graph. Figure 1 shows the DB(2, 3)
binary de-Bruijn graph.
In this paper, we consider WSN as a multi-layer de-Bruijn
structure, in which each edge represents a communication
link of the network. A network topology should allow each
node to send packets to every other node. A routing algorithm
determines the path through which a packet is delivered to the
destination node. The distance between two nodes is the
shortest length between nodes. The diameter of the network is
the largest distance between any two nodes in the network.
The degree of a node is the number of communication links
(edges) associated with that node. The degree of the network
is the largest degree of any node in the given network.
Consider a single layer of the de-Bruijn graph as shown
in Figure 1. Let the source node be S = sk−1sk–2, …, s1s0 and
the destination node be D = dk−1dk−2, …, d1d0. A packet
header is attached to each ongoing packet from the source.
The packet header consists of graph counter ‘c’. The counter
‘c’ is used to record the number of packets hops from the
source node to the current node. This is used to generate the
address of the next node.
 Fault-tolerant de-Bruijn graph based MARP for WSNs
From the property of de-Bruijn graph the two paths are
defined as:
PATH1:
( c = 0 ) sk −1 sk − 2 , … , s1 s0 (source address)
( c = 1) d0 sk −1 sk − 2 ,… , s1
( c = 2 ) d1 d 0 , sk −1 ,… , s2
( c = k ) d k −1d k − 2 ,… , d0 (destination address)
PATH2:
( c = 0 ) sk −1 sk − 2 , … , s1 s0 (source address)
( c = 1) sk − 2 sk −3 ,… , s0 d k −1
( c = k ) d k −1 d k − 2 ,… , d0 (destination address)
4 Proposed architecture
In this section, we present multi-layered architecture and
new routing schemes.
De-Bruijn graph with cluster head: Before we can discuss
the actual architecture we will describe the concept of
cluster head in a de-Bruijn graph. Figure 2 shows a typical
binary de-Bruijn graph DB(2, k) having diameter (k) = 3 and
degree (2r) = 4, having total numbers of node, N = rk = 8. At
the centre there is an extra node called as cluster head. The
function of the cluster head is to gather data from all other
nodes and pass it to the base station. Depending upon the
energy and physical location constraint, a cluster head may
have coverage area of region 1, i.e. all the nodes within
region 1 can directly communicate to and from cluster head.
In Figure 2 it is clear that node 000 and node 111 are not
connected to the cluster head. Thus, the data from these
nodes are routed via 001 or 100 (in case of node 000) and
Figure 2 DB(2, 3) binary de-Bruijn graph based sensor network with cluster head (see online version for colours)
163
011 or 110 (in case of node 111). Similarly, it is also
possible that due to physical location set-up the node 001
and 011 may be very far (same for nodes 100 and 110) and
therefore may not be able to communicate with each other.
Thus, if the data need to communicated from 001 to 011 it is
routed via cluster head. Thus, this architecture has property
of having de-Bruijn graph and cluster head all together. This
whole architecture acts as one layer for our multi-layered
architecture. In the following we describe our multi-layered
architecture.
4.1 Multi-layered structure
Here, each layer is connected in parallel fashion. Figure 3
shows the multi-layered architecture. Each node is
connected to other nodes just above and below to it (except
for top and bottommost layers, for which there is no layer
above and below to it, respectively). The node above to a
given node is called as parent node while the node below to
a give node is called as child node. Similarly, cluster heads
are also connected, i.e. each cluster head is connected
to cluster heads above and below to it. There is an extra
connection from each cluster head to the base station. Thus,
after collecting all the data from the nodes the cluster head
passes this information to the base station. The cluster head
above to a given cluster head is called as parent cluster head
while the cluster head below to a give cluster head is called
as child cluster head. To check whether a given node is in
vicinity of a node or not, the node periodically sends a
‘hello’ packet. The recipient node replies with ‘hello-reply’
packet which tells that it is in neighbourhood. If a node
receives ‘hello-reply’ packet then it places the node-id
(address) of the sender in its table which maintains node
reachable information. If according to de-Bruijn graph a
node should be in neighbourhood, but is not (no ‘hello-
reply’ packet received) then that node is considered as
unreachable. This information is used for multicasting and
broadcasting.
164 V. Mishra, J. Mathew and D.K. Pradhan
Figure 3 Multi-layered de-Bruijn graph based network structure (see online version for colours)
Addressing mechanism: Addressing in this multi-layered
architecture plays a crucial role for routing the
packet efficiently. Here, we use two level addressing
mechanisms. The first level tells the layer number of the
designated node while the second level tells the particular
designated node within that layer. The second level is
further divided into two parts, one for addressing cluster
head while other part for addressing rest of the nodes in that
layer. We will discuss these in details in packet header
format.
Figure 4 Packet format (see online version for colours)
Routing packet header: For routing of packets within the
nodes, to and from base station, each packet is attached with a
packet header. The format of the packet header is shown in
Figure 4. The routing packet header consists of 3-bit flag,
previous address, 5-bit graph counter, 8-bit hop counter and
option field. It also has the two level addressing fields whose
size depends upon the size of the network. Here, we consider
Level 1 and Level 2 addresses each of 8 bits. Thus, this network
has the capacity of 28 – 1 = 255 layers, each having 2(8−1) =
128 nodes. The different values of Flags are explained here.
 Fault-tolerant de-Bruijn graph based MARP for WSNs
• 000: Indicates that the packet is to be routed within the
same layer and has to use Path I if required.
• 001: Indicates that the packet is to be routed within the
same layer and has to use Path II if required.
• 010: It means that the packet is to be routed from a
layer to a layer below to it.
• 011: It means that the packet is to be routed from a
layer to a layer above it.
• 110: When this value is set, the cluster head understand
that this is multicast packet and is needed to be sent to
all the nodes in a particular layer. The Level 1 address
tells the layer to which all nodes should receive that
packet.
• 111: This is broadcast flag. If this value is set, it means
that the packet should be received by all the nodes in
the whole network.
• 100: This flag is generated by base station for fault
request. When this packet is received by nodes it means
that the node has to generate packets having flag = 101.
• 101: This flag is set by nodes when they receive packet
with flag = 100. When flag = 101, it means that the
packet will have three extra fields (option fields) called
as node fault, head fault and base fault. These fields
consist of the address of the nodes that are not reachable.
The values of Level 1 address are:
00000000: Indicates that the packet is destined for base
station.
00000001: Indicates that that the packet is destined for node
in Layer 1.
11111111: Indicates that the packet is destined for node in
layer 255.
Similarly the values of Level 2 address are:
00000000: indicates the packet is destined for node ID
0000000 (7 bits)
01111111: It means that the packet is destined for node ID
1111111 (7 bits)
1xxxxxxx: Denotes the packet is destined for cluster head.
The field previous address contains the address of the last
node from which the packet was sent. This is used to avoid
the packets going into simple loop. Our routing protocol is
designed in such a way that a packet will go into loop only
if the network suffers from catastrophic failure (i.e. nodes
become faulty and an alternative route is to be used). A loop
in our architecture mainly follows 1-2-1 loop. In that
condition ‘previous address’ field is helpful. It is very rare
that a loop like 1-2-3-1 occurs. Even if this occurs we use a
165
hop counter field, which is used to drop the packets if
their values exceed a certain threshold. The hop counter is
initially set to 0 and is incremented by a value of 1 through
each hop.
Graph counter is the counter maintained within a
particular layer so as to perform proper Path I and Path II
routing. This value is set to 0 when path changes from I to II
or vice versa. Also the value is set to 0 whenever the packet
performs inter-layer routing.
Option field is the field which exists only when flag
value is set to 101. It contains the values node fault, head
fault and base fault.
Intra-layer routing: The routing within the same layer is
simple. All the packets generated by a node are sent to the
cluster head which in turn route the packet to the destination
node. If the cluster head is not reachable from a node, then
the packet is routed using the Path I or Path II to the
destination node. If a node is not reachable from cluster
head, then the packet is sent to the neighbour of the
destination node. Figure 5 shows the algorithm for the intra-
layer routing.
Inter-layer routing: When the source node lies above the
destination node, the flag is set to 010 and the packet is first
routed to the cluster head of that layer. After this the cluster
head send this packet to the cluster head of the destination
node layer. This is done by incrementing the Level 1
address field of the current node by a value 1, and sending
the packet to the resultant two-level address. When the
packet is in the layer containing the destination node, intra-
layer routing is performed. Similarly when the source node
lies below the destination node, the flag is set to 011 and a
similar process is performed except that here Level 1
address of the current node is decremented by a value of 1.
When the cluster head is not reachable from the source
node, the packet is directly routed to the nodes above or
below to it when the flag value is 011 and 010, respectively.
In worst case, if these nodes are also not reachable then the
packet is routed to any neighbour node within the same
layer. Now this node performs the whole processing again.
Figure 6 shows inter-layer routing performed when the
cluster head is not reachable by the source node.
Multicast addressing: If the flag value is set to 110, it means
that the packet is meant for all the nodes in the layer having
same Level 1 address as that of the packet. Here, there is no
significance of level 2 address. When a cluster head receives
a packet with flag value 110, it broadcast the packet. All the
nodes compare the flag value and the Level 1 address to
check whether the packet is meant for them, if Level 1
address matches then the packet is received by the nodes.
There might be some nodes which would not be in the
communicable region of the cluster head but belong to the
same layer. Since the cluster head maintains the list of all
the nodes in the communicable region, it can predict which
nodes have not received the packet. Therefore, it can now
send the packet to these nodes using intra-layer routing.
166 V. Mishra, J. Mathew and D.K. Pradhan

Figure 5 Proposed multi-layered intra-layer routing in sensor network (see online version for colours)

Figure 6 Proposed multi-layered inter-layer routing in sensor network (see online version for colours)
 Fault-tolerant de-Bruijn graph based MARP for WSNs
Broadcast addressing: If the flag value is set to 111, then
the packet is meant to be received by each and every node in
the network. When a cluster head receives the packet with
flag = 111, it not only perform multicast addressing in its
own layer but also send the packet to the cluster head above
and below to it. Here, a copy of the packet is maintained by
the cluster head so that when it receives the same packet
again it drops it.
4.2 Simple fault detection mechanism
During certain fixed interval of time, the base station
generates a packet named as fault request packet with
RF = 100, which is similar to the broadcast packet. The only
difference between the simple broadcast packet and the fault
request packet is that the fault request packet asks the nodes
to send a packet with flag = 101 to the base station, also
the generated packet has three extra fields (optional field)
node fault, head fault and base fault. Initially, the values
contained in these fields are 0. Suppose a node x receives
a packet with flag = 100, it will generate a packet with
flag = 101 destined to base station. Now on the way to the
destination if this packet has to be routed through y, and y is
not in communicable range, then the packet is routed
through any other path z. The value of y is entered to any of
the three fields: node fault, head fault and base fault
depending upon whether y was a simple node, cluster head
or base station, respectively. If the base station receives a
packet with flag = 101, it will check for the values in these
extra fields and can predict the places where fault has
occurred. These faults can be either due to failure of the
nodes or due to the failure of the communication between
two nodes due to interference. It is also possible that a noise
could have hampered the communication for a while, in
such cases we can take multiple reading of the packets with
flag = 101 so as to make sure that the fault has occurred
or not.
Scalability: The described architecture is highly scalable
and can support additional layers until all the values of
Level 1 address are used. If a layer is to be added, it can be
added to the layer below the last layer of the network. Also
if we want to insert a layer in between the network it can
be done with very less amount of work. Suppose a network
consist of four layers: a, b, c and d, and we want to insert
a layer ‘x’ in between ‘b’ and ‘c’, it can be done by
modifying the Level 1 address of all the nodes in the layer
‘c’ and the layers below to it. For this purpose, a data
packet is sent by each node of the layer ‘x’ to the node just
below to it, i.e. of layer ‘c’. The data in the packet contain
the instruction for the node to add a value 1 to their present
Level 1 address. Again this node passes the same packet to
the layer below to it and this process continues until all the
167
layers below ‘x’ have incremented their Level 1 address by
a value of 1.
Three-dimensions to two-dimension mapping: Our
architecture is mainly suitable for infrastructure-based
deterministic deployment. For random deployment a de-
Bruijn formation protocol should be implemented, so that
all nodes are automatically assigned the node-ids. We left
the de-Bruijn formation protocol as future work. Also,
Zhang and Hou (2006) proved that a deterministic
deployment requires fewer nodes to cover the same area in
comparison to random deployment. Our architecture can be
directly applied in three-dimensional space. For example, in
a building each floor can have a layer of the proposed
architecture. Thus, all the nodes in a single floor will have
the same Level 1 address and forms the de-Bruijn graph
along with a cluster head. The routing perform within a
floor is intra-layer routing and between the floors is inter-
layer routing. Another application could be in pillars of a
bridge. Nodes can be deployed layer-wise, and hence
covering the whole pillar from all the sides. Our architecture
is not limited only to three-dimensional space. If the
application requires that the sensor nodes are to be used in
a two-dimensional array/grid pattern rather than three-
dimensional pattern (e.g. in a land field), the same
architecture can be used with little modification. Figure 7
shows the conversion of three-dimensional network (with
diameter = 3 in one sub graph) into a two-dimensional
network (with diameter = 3 in one sub graph). There is no
change in routing protocol, addressing mechanism or the
cluster head property. Thus, all the features of multi-layer
network are utilised here.
For a (2, 3) de-Bruijn graph we have the total number of
interconnections within a single layer as 21 (13 within
nodes + 8 with cluster head). The total number of
interconnection between two layers is 9 (8 between nodes +
1 between cluster head). Let n be the number of layers, then
total number of interconnections is given by 21n + 9
(n – 1).For a two-dimensionally mapped de-Bruijn network,
the total number of interconnection within a single layer
is 21 (13 within nodes + 8 with cluster head). The total
number of interconnection between two layers is 3
(2 between nodes + 1 between cluster head). Therefore, the
total number of interconnections is given by 21n + 3(n – 1).
The total number of decrease in connection equals 6(n – 1).
Therefore, the percentage fault is given by [(6(n–1)]/
[21n + 9(n – 1)] The plotted graph in Figure 8 shows that as
the number of layers increases the two-dimensional mapped
network can be assumed to be three-dimensional networks
with some fault introduced. The percentage fault tends to
become constant for a large number of layers in the network
around 20%.
168 V. Mishra, J. Mathew and D.K. Pradhan

Figure 7 Three-dimensional to two-dimensional mapping of sensor network (see online version for colours)
 Fault-tolerant de-Bruijn graph based MARP for WSNs 169

Figure 8 Fault analysis of three-dimensional to two-dimensional our architecture to other broadcasting, multicasting routing
mapping (see online version for colours) protocols because our proposed architecture differs in many
20 ways. A comparison table with other retransmission based
(Alwan and Agarwal, 2009) and relay node-based fault-
19
tolerant sensor networks is shown in Table 1. To illustrate
18 the performance with different configuration of our
protocol, comparison is shown with different configuration
17 having different number of nodes in each layer.
Percentage Fault

16
15
14
13
12
11
2 4 6 8 10 12
No. of Layers
14
5 Simulation results
The techniques presented in this paper have been
implemented in C++ based on SENSE simulation tool
(Chen et al., 2004) to evaluate the performance. We
compare the proposed routing protocol to Huynh and Hong
(2005) and Mishra et al. (2009) as these are the other
de-Bruijn graph based WSN architectures. We use similar
network design choices such as network topology, node
addressing and packet routing as shown by Huynh and
Hong (2005) and Mishra et al. (2009) implementation.
Since these architectures do not implement features like
broadcasting, multicasting, fault detection and cluster head,
these properties are not compared. Also we cannot compare
The simulation uses MAC IEEE 802.15.4 based
ZIGBEE which is implemented over SENSE. The de-Bruijn
graph based routing protocol is the heart of the network
layer. We use a simple transport protocol of best effort
service. The application layer implements Constant Bit
Rate (CBR). To compare the performance of the protocol,
we choose random pairs of source and destination which
communicate with each other. The simulation time is
2000 seconds.
16 18 20 Figure 9 shows the comparison of our algorithm with
Huynh and Hong (2005) and Mishra et al. (2009) in terms of
end-to-end delay in the network. The delay taken is in ms.
We use 32 nodes per layer in the network architecture. It is
clear from the graph that as the number of layers increases,
the delay in our network increases linearly, while in other
architecture it increases exponentially. This is because in
other architecture the number of nodes doubles with each
increment in number of layers. Similarly, Figure 10 shows
the comparison in terms of energy consumed in the network.
The initial energy is 106 units and the dissipation rate is
10−5 units per packet transfer. Here also we can see that our
architecture has better energy performance by about 50%
than Mishra et al. (2009). Figure 11 shows the comparison
in terms of success ratio. Here, we can see that our
architecture has high success ratio and as the number of
layers increases our architecture performs better.

Table 1 Fault-tolerant routing protocols performance metrics

Disjoint multipath
based retransmission Braided multipath Energy aware multipath
Performance Relay node based (Intanagonwiwat et al., based retransmission based retransmission
metrics (Han et al., 2010) 2000) (Ganesan et al., 2001) (Hassanein and Luo, 2006) Proposed protocol
Energy High; Requires High; requires periodic Medium; requires High; requires periodic No periodic broadcast
consumption exchange of routing broadcast for disjoint periodic broadcast broadcast to maintain a needed
information at paths to maintains the backup path for each path
periodic intervals. braided path
Memory Requires routing Routing table + Caching Routing table + Routing table + Caching of Caching of packet at
Usage table + Caching of of packet at each node Caching of packet at packet at each node single node only
packet at nodes each node
Scaling Increases the routing Routing table size Routing table size + Routing table size increases No such effects
Effects table size and the increases + Fault increases + Fault + Fault recovery time
time to calculate recovery time recovery time increases
disjoint path increases increases
Overhead Extra k relay nodes Flooding overhead Flooding overhead Maintains alternate path Overhead only during
for each n sensor Fault detection phase
nodes
Fault None None None None Provide 3 levels of
Detection simple fault detection
Recovery Immediate Time for sink to detect Time for sink to detect Time to send the error Immediate
time an absence of event and an absence of event and message to the sink and
reinitiate another path reinforce another path source.
170 V. Mishra, J. Mathew and D.K. Pradhan

Now we compare our architecture with different configurations. Figure 10 Energy consumed as a function of number of
When source and destination are within network, Figure 12 layers (see online version for colours)
shows the delay taken by the packets to be received at the 450
destination nodes with respect to the number of layers in the
Our Protocol
network. Blue graph shows the network with eight nodes in 400
Ref[18]
each layer. While green graph shows the network with Ref[8]
350
32 nodes in each layer and red graph shows the network with
64 nodes in each layer. Figures 13 and 14 show the total energy 300
consumed and success ratio of the whole network, respectively.

Energy Consumed
The success ratio of the graph is important for a given network. 250
For example if we want to have 64 nodes in a network it is
possible to have eight layers of eight nodes each, or four layers 200
of 16 nodes in each, or two layers of 32 nodes in each. If we
150
choose eight layers of eight nodes in each we have delay =
0.024, energy consumed = 12 and success ratio= 0.987, while if 100
we choose four layers of 16 nodes in each we have delay =
0.016, energy consumed = 8 and success ratio = 0.993; and if 50
we choose two layers of 32 nodes in each we have delay =
0.009, energy consumed = 7 and success ratio = 0.997. 0
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
Therefore, from the above analysis, it is better to have No. of Layers
maximum number of nodes in each layer.
Figure 15 shows the graph of total energy consumed in Figure 11 Success ratio as a function of number of layers
the whole network as a function of the number of layers in (see online version for colours)
the network. This shows the case when destination is base
station. Figure 16 shows the delay taken by the packets to be
received by the base station. Our analysis shows that the
success ratio of the packets received by the base station as a
function of the number of layers is almost constant. It is
clear that the energy consumed and success ratio is almost
same for each type of configuration. The delay for network
having less number of nodes in each layer is less in
comparison to the networks having more number of nodes
in each layer. Figure 17 shows the graph of delay taken for
broadcasting the packet in the whole network as a function
of the number of layers in the network. As the number of
layers increases the delay taken for broadcasting a packet
also increases rapidly. Figure 18 shows, for multicast packet
routing, the graph of the delay taken by a packet when
routed by multicast to all the nodes in a particular layer.
From the graph it is clear that there is not much difference
Figure 12 End-to-end delay with different configurations as a
in the delay taken as the number of layers increases. function of number of layers (see online version for
colours)
Figure 9 Delay in the network as a function of number of layers
(see online version for colours) 0.07

8 nodes/layer 1280 nodes

0.25
0.06 32 nodes/layer
Our Protocol 640 nodes
64 nodes/layer
Ref[8] 160 nodes
0.2 Ref[8] 0.05

640 nodes
0.04
320 nodes
Delay

0.15
Delay

80 nodes
0.03

0.1
0.02

0.05
0.01

0
0
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
No. of Layers No. of Layers
 Fault-tolerant de-Bruijn graph based MARP for WSNs 171

Figure 13 Energy consumed with different configurations as a function 100] in the network. The network consumes more energy
of number of layers (see online version for colours) when it suffers with severe fault. Figure 20 shows the delay
120 taken by a packet to be reached within a network as a
8 nodes/layer
1280 nodes
function of the fault percentage in the network. From the
100
32 nodes/layer
640 nodes graph it is clear that networks having less number of nodes in
64 nodes/layer
160 nodes each layer have less delay in comparison to with the same
80
fault percentage to a network having more number of nodes
Energy Consumed

in each layer. Figure 21 shows the success ratio of the packet

routing within the network. A network having less number of
60 640 nodes
320 nodes
nodes in each layer suffers less from fault.
80 nodes
40 Figure 16 Delay when destination is base station (see online
version for colours)
20 0.012
640 nodes 640 nodes
1280 nodes
320 nodes 160 nodes
0 0.01 80 nodes
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
No. of Layers

0.008
Figure 14 Success ratio with different configurations as a function
of number of layers (see online version for colours)

Delay
0.006

0.004
8 nodes/layer
32 nodes/layer
0.002 64 nodes/layer

0
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
No. of Layers

Figure 17 Delay taken for broadcasting into the whole network

(see online version for colours)
0.14
8 nodes/layer 1280 nodes
32 nodes/layer 640 nodes
0.12
64 nodes/layer 160 nodes

0.1
640 nodes
Figure 15 Energy consumed when destination is base station 0.08
320 node
(see online version for colours) 80 nodes
Delay

120
1280 nodes 0.06
8 nodes/layer 640 nodes
160 nodes
32 nodes/layer
100 64 nodes/layer
0.04

80 640 nodes 0.02

320 nodes
Energy Consumed

80 nodes

0
60 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20
No. of Layers

40
Figure 22 shows the success ratio (total packets received/total
packets sent) of the packet routing within the network as
20
a function of simulation time. This simulation was run for
2000 seconds. After 1000 seconds it shows a steep decrease
0
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 in the success ratio due to the depletion of the batteries of
No. of Layers
each node. All three configurations, eight nodes, 16 nodes
and 32 nodes, in each layer have almost same performance
When the network has some faults (node fault or with very little difference. The three-dimensional to two-
communication fault), Figure 19 shows the graph of energy dimensional mapping can be interpreted as network having
consumed in a faulty network as a function of the fault 20% fault. Thus, simulation result with 20% fault will have
percentage [(number of faulty nodes/total number of nodes)* same results for two-dimensional mapped networks.
172 V. Mishra, J. Mathew and D.K. Pradhan

Figure 18 Delay taken when multicasting to a group is performed Figure 21 Success ratio as a function of percentage faults in the
(see online version for colours) network (see online version for colours)
0.019 1

8 nodes/layer 1280 nodes

0.95 160 nodes
32 nodes/layer
0.018 640 nodes 640 nodes
64 nodes/layer
160 nodes 1280 nodes
0.9
0.017
0.85

Success Ratio
0.016 640 nodes
Delay

320 nodes 0.8

80 nodes
0.015
0.75

0.014 0.7

0.013 0.65

0.012 0 10 20 30 40 50
2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 Pecentage Fault
No. of Layers

Figure 22 Success ratio as a function of the simulation time

Figure 19 Energy consumed as a function of the percentage
(see online version for colours)
faults in the network (see online version for colours)
100

90 160 node
640 nodes
80 1280 nodes

70
Energy Consumed

60

50

40

30

20

10
0 10 20 30 40 50
Percentage Fault

6 Experimental results
Figure 20 Delay in the network as a function of the fault percentage
in the network (see online version for colours)
A small experiment of de-Bruijn graph based routing
0.046
protocol is done with mica2 motes to check its feasibility in
160 nodes
0.044
640 nodes
real-life scenario. Mica2 mote is one of the commercially
0.042 1280 nodes available sensor nodes developed by Crossbow technology
incorporation; a typical mica2 mote is shown in Figure 23.
0.04
The mica2 motes runs TinyOS, which is a component-based
0.038 operating system developed for low-powered wireless
Delay

0.036 communication devices developed by UC Berkeley. The

network consists of eight nodes forming a single layer of
0.034
de-Bruijn graph without the cluster head (Figure 1) as
0.032 shown in Figure 24. Out of eight nodes three nodes are
0.03 attached with the sensor board mts310 to measure the light
intensity falling on the nodes and one node with id = 0 is
0.028
connected to the serial gateway mib510, which passes all
0.026
0 10 20 30 40 50 packets received to a computer through serial port as shown
Percentage Fault in Figure 25. Rest of the nodes is used for routing the
 Fault-tolerant de-Bruijn graph based MARP for WSNs 173

packets. The measured light intensity value is displayed Figure 24 Test bed of mica2 motes with left most as node id = 0
using a Java-based Oscilloscope application provided by (see online version for colours)
TinyOS (Figure 26).
A constantly random moving white light source was
used to illuminate the photo sensors. The variation in the light
intensity can be seen in the oscilloscope graph. As light
source moves away from the sensor there is a decrease in the
graph value. Artificial faults were introduced by turning off
nodes. When the faults are introduced the packets travel
through another path with negligible delay. The continuity in
the oscilloscope graph depicts this behaviour.

Figure 23 A typical mica2 mote (see online version for colours)

Figure 25 Mica2 mote on top of mib510 serial gateway board
(see online version for colours)

Figure 26 Oscilloscope displaying the value of the packets received (see online version for colours)
174 V. Mishra, J. Mathew and D.K. Pradhan
7 Conclusions
In this paper, we presented an efficient de-Bruijn multi-
layered architecture for WSN called as Multipurpose
Architecture and Routing Protocol (MARP). The MARP
supports multicast routing, broadcasting, fault detection and
efficient fault-tolerance. Its unique architecture makes it
easily scalable and provides easy three-dimensional and two-
dimensional implementation. On average, we have about 40%
improvement in end-to-end delay. Our simulation results
show that as the number of layers increases our algorithm
performs better. We also analyse the energy and average
transmission ratio of the randomly generated traffic. We show
that, depending on the fault-tolerance capability one wants,
design requires higher redundancy. We also demonstrated the
feasibility of the de-Bruijn graph based routing protocol in
real-life scenario by a simple experiment using eight mica2
motes.
Acknowledgements
The work was partially funded by the Engineering and
Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC), UK, under
Grant No. EP/F030991/1.
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