Online Distributed Fault Diagnosis in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents an online fault diagnosis algorithm for wireless sensor networks. This work explicitly takes into account the possibility of faults in different sections of sensor networks and communication channel. The diagnostic local view is obtained by exploiting the spatially correlated sensor measurements. These local views are then disseminated using a spanning tree of cluster heads. Our algorithm is shown to be energy efficient as it works in conjunction with the normal network activities and requires minimum additional diagnostic messages to be exchanged. Simulation results show that the performance of our algorithm is less sensitive to the average node degree for a wide range of fault rates.