Distributed Diagnosis of Permanent and Intermittent Faults in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Faults are inevitable in Wireless Sensors Networks (WSNs)because of physical defects caused due to environmental hazards, imperfection or hardware and/or software related glitches. If faults are not detected and handled properly the consequences may be inexorable in case of safety critical applications. This paper presents a distributed fault diagnosis algorithm to handle both permanent and intermittent faults in WSNs. The proposed diagnosis algorithm is based on the comparison of test results and residual energy estimations by neighboring sensor nodes. The intermittent faults are handled by iterating the comparisons for r rounds. The basic time-out mechanism is adopted to handle permanently faulty sensor nodes.