A Health Monitoring System for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are deployed today to monitor the environment, but their own health status is relatively opaque to network administrators, in most cases. In this paper we present alternative communication strategies to monitor wireless sensor networks, and then develop and study in more detail a distributed monitoring mechanism that aims at localized decision making and minimizing the propagation of false alarms. Key constraints of such systems include low energy consumption and low complexity. Key performance measures of this mechanism include high detection accuracy (low false alarm probabilities) and high responsiveness (low response latency). We investigate the tradeoff via simulation.