A versatile architecture for the distributed sensor integration problem

Proposes a versatile architecture for a distributed sensor network which consists of a multilevel network with the nodes (processing element/sensor pairs) at each level interconnected as a deBruijn network. The authors show that this multilevel network has reasonable fault tolerance, admits simple and decentralized routing, and offers easy extensibility. They model information from sensors as real valued intervals and derive an interesting property related to information integration in the presence of faults. Using this property, the search for a fault is narrowed down to two potentially faulty sensors or communication links. In a distributed environment, information has to be integrated from “temporally close” signals in the presence of imperfect clocks in a distributed environment. The authors apply the results of past research in this area to state various relationships between the clocks of the processing elements in the network for proper information integration