Improving fault-tolerant scheme for a time-sensitive autonomous local wireless sensor network

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have been widely applied to many fields including industry, science and environment monitoring. A typical wireless sensor network comprises distributed sensors and a sink. The sink gathers and analyzes the data from distributed sensors and then takes the corresponding action accordingly. Such an architecture is vulnerable to a single-point of failure problem. In addition, when sensors do not have a direct link with the sink, they must deliver data by hopping through other sensors. The sink may take a longer time to collect data. Furthermore, some faulty sensors may cause an incorrect result. To overcome the single-point of failure problem and the unexpected sensor faultiness in a traditional wireless sensor network, we propose a consensus problem algorithm which is applied to an autonomous local wireless sensor network without a centralized sink. Since there is no need to send the detected value from distributed sensors to a central sink, our scheme can conduct a quick and direct action taking. Additionally, distributed computing in such an autonomous local wireless sensor network can endure limited faulty sensors and environment interference.