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.

18 pages,13 Figures, 7 Tables