Locating Link Failures in WSNs via Cluster Consensus and Graph Decomposition

Abstract

With the popularization of network equipment and the rapid development of information technology, the scale and complexity of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) continue to expand. How to effectively locate link failures has become a challenging problem in WSNs. In this paper, we propose a novel method of locating link failures based on distributed cluster consensus protocol and graph decomposition technique. In our method, the initial data is injected into sensor nodes for distributed interactions, and then link failures can be located by observing and comparing the output data of the nodes. The proposed method is suitable for the situations with both single-link failure and multi-link failures, and has no limitations on the number, distribution and correlation of link failures. Necessary and sufficient conditions are provided to guarantee the accuracy of the proposed method in locating link failures. At last, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by both real and simulation experiments.