An Autonomous Wireless Sensor Network with Fault Resilience

Wireless sensor networks have been practically applied to many fields including industry, science and environment monitoring. A traditional wireless sensor network is made of several distributed sensors and one sink. The sink gathers and analyzes the data from sensors and then makes some actuator take the corresponding action accordingly. A sensor-sink based architecture is vulnerable to a single-point of failure problem. If a sensor does not have a direct link with the sink, it must deliver data by hopping through other sensors. The sink may take a longer time to collect data and even make a decision. On the other hand, unexpected faulty sensors may result in an incorrect diagnosis. Based on above, we propose an autonomous wireless sensor network where regional sensors determine the local action based on the local measurements to raise the efficiency of action taking and use a consensus problem based algorithm to raise its fault resilience. In this article, we also prove correctness of the proposed scheme and analyze its computation complexity.