Fault detection of wireless sensor networks

This paper presents a distributed fault detection algorithm for wireless sensor networks. Faulty sensor nodes are identified based on comparisons between neighboring nodes and dissemination of the decision made at each node. Time redundancy is used to tolerate transient faults in sensing and communication. To eliminate delay involved in time redundancy scheme a sliding window is employed with some storage for previous comparison results. Simulation results show that sensor nodes with permanent faults are identified with high accuracy for a wide range of fault rates, while most of the transient faults are tolerated with negligible performance degradation.