Power watermarking: Facilitating power-based diagnosis of node silence in remote high-end sensing systems

Our prior work suggested the use of power traces of unresponsive sensor nodes to diagnose the cause of anomalous node silence, but suffers from its limitations in scalability. To address these issues, we propose a new concept of power watermarking, a diagnostic service that actively produces unique power watermarks for each system state of interest so as to convey system information over power measurements. Failures of applications, hardware, or the watermark generator result in different watermark combinations or absence thereof. Experiments demonstrate high diagnostic accuracy and energy efficiency, even in the presence of multiple applications of similar natural power consumption patterns.