  A wireless sensor network consists of several sensor nodes. Sensor nodes
collaborate to collect meaningful environmental information and send them to
the base station. During these processes, nodes are prone to failure, due to
the energy depletion, hardware or software failure, etc. Therefore, fault
tolerance and energy efficiency are two important objectives for reliable
packet delivery. To address these objectives a novel method called fuzzy
informer homed routing protocol is introduced. The proposed method tries to
distribute the workload between every sensor node. A fuzzy logic approach is
used to handle uncertainties in cluster head communication range estimation.
The simulation results show that the proposed method can significantly reduce
energy consumption as compared with IHR and DHR protocols. Furthermore, results
revealed that it performs better than IHR and DHR protocols in terms of first
node dead and half of the nodes alive, throughput and total remaining energy.
It is concluded that the proposed protocol is a stable and energy efficient
fault tolerance algorithm for wireless sensor networks.
