A new architecture for distributed sensor integration

The authors propose 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 de Bruijn network. They 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 state 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 results of past research in this area are used to state various relationships between the clocks of the processing elements in the network for proper information integration