An Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Event Detection Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sung-Jib Yim,Yoon-Hwa Choi

doi:10.3390/s100302332

Abstract

In this paper, we present an adaptive fault-tolerant event detection scheme for wireless sensor networks. Each sensor node detects an event locally in a distributed manner by using the sensor readings of its neighboring nodes. Confidence levels of sensor nodes are used to dynamically adjust the threshold for decision making, resulting in consistent performance even with increasing number of faulty nodes. In addition, the scheme employs a moving average filter to tolerate most transient faults in sensor readings, reducing the effective fault probability. Only three bits of data are exchanged to reduce the communication overhead in detecting events. Simulation results show that event detection accuracy and false alarm rate are kept very high and low, respectively, even in the case where 50% of the sensor nodes are faulty.

Highlights

Wireless sensor networks often consist of a large number of small sensor nodes that cooperate to monitor real-world events and enable applications such as target tracking, military tactical surveillance, and emergency health care [1]
We present a distributed adaptive fault-tolerant event detection scheme for wireless sensor networks
Our simulated sensor network consists of 1,024 sensor nodes, randomly deployed in a 32 × 32 square region

Summary

Introduction

Wireless sensor networks often consist of a large number of small sensor nodes that cooperate to monitor real-world events and enable applications such as target tracking, military tactical surveillance, and emergency health care [1]. Faulty nodes might issue an alarm even though they are not in an event region. They degrade the network reliability, unless some provisions are made to tolerate them. Several distributed schemes for detecting events in the presence of faulty sensor nodes have been proposed in [2,3,4,5]. A single binary variable is used to represent a local event detection, resulting in low communication cost. Their simulation results show that 85∼95% of faults can be reduced when fault rate is about 10%. Luo et al [3]

Objectives

Results

Conclusion