A distributed adaptive scheme for detecting faults in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

This paper presents a distributed adaptive scheme for detecting faults in wireless sensor networks. Each sensor nodes makes a local decision based on the comparisons of its own readings with those of neighbors, along with the dissemination of the decision to them, if necessary. At the end of each fault detection cycle, each node dynamically adjusts critical parameters in the distributed fault detection algorithm, such as node degree and thresholds, resulting in high performance for a wide range of fault probabilities. By extensive computer simulation the scheme is shown to be scalable with the number of faulty sensor nodes except for sparse networks where the average node degree is extremely low.