Fault Discrimination in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In current times, one of the promising and interesting areas of research is Wireless Sensor Networks. A Wireless Sensor Network consists of spatially distributed sensors to monitor environmental and physical conditions such as temperature, sound, pressure etc. It is built of nodes where each node is connected to one or more sensors. They are used for Medical applications, Security monitoring, Structural monitoring and Traffic monitoring etc. The number of sensor nodes in a Wireless Sensor Network can vary in the range of hundreds to thousands. In this project work we propose a distributed algorithm for detection of faults in a Wireless Sensor Network and to classify the faulty nodes. In our algorithm the sensor nodes are classified as being Fault Free, Transiently Faulty or Intermittently Faulty considering the energy differences from its neighbors in different rounds of the algorithm run. We have shown the simulation results in the form of the output messages from the nodes depicting their health and also compared the results in form of graphs for different average node degrees and different number of rounds of our algorithm run.