A novel approach for monitoring Wireless Sensor Network performance by tracking node operational deviation

recently, many potential fields, such as the military, increasingly depend on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for monitoring and controlling their different application processes as a result of the network special characteristics. Although these characteristics reduce the cost of network manufacture and deployment, they nevertheless add new challenges in terms of network operation deviation from norm. Unfortunately, this deviation, in some cases, badly affects the network´s collected data and makes it meaningless. This paper proposes a distributed monitoring algorithm that enables each node in a large scale WSN to track the operation of its neighbour nodes and report any deviation that is expected to effect network functionality. The proposed algorithm´s functionality was tested on a Berkeley (Crossbow) Mica2 sensor Motes test bed with the TinyOS ‘Surge’ multihop application. The results of the conducted experiments show that the algorithm achieves a high level of detection reliability.