Distributed fault diagnosis of wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), faults occurring to sensor nodes are common due to the sensor device itself and the harsh deployment environment. In order to avoid degradation of service due to faults, it is necessary for the WSN to be able to detect faults early. In this paper we propose a localized fault diagnosis algorithm which executes in tree-like networks effectively. It is based on local comparisons of sensed data and dissemination of the test results to the remaining sensors. Furthermore, Times redundancy is used to diagnose the intermittent fault in sensing and communication. Simulation results show the proposed algorithm has high detection accuracy and low false alarm rate.