This paper was presented at The International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications (SENSORCOMM 2007), held in Valencia (Spain) from the 14 to 20 October 2007.

Abstract: In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), faults may occur
through malfunctioning hardware, software errors or by external
causes such as fire and flood. In business applications
where WSNs are applied, failures in essential parts
of the sensor network must be efficiently detected and automatically
recovered. Current approaches proposed in the
literature do not cover all the requirements of a fault tolerant
system to be deployed in an enterprise environment
and therefore are not suitable for such applications. In
this paper we investigate these solutions and present FTCoWiseNets,
a framework designed to improve the availability
of heterogeneous WSNs through an efficient fault tolerance
support. The proposed framework satisfies the requirements
and demonstrates to be more adequate to business
scenarios than the current approaches.