A reactive scheme for detecting soft faults in wireless sensor networks

Currently available fault detection approaches generally pursue high fault detection performance but neglect energy consumption due to high volume of messages exchanged during fault detection process. Therefore, in this work we propose a reactive distributed scheme for detecting faulty nodes. The scheme is able to detect transient and permanent faulty nodes accurately with very less false alarm rate. In our scheme, all nodes individually analyze their measured data for detecting any suspicious behavior through utilizing temporal correlation. If a node finds itself suspicious of possessing faulty data, only then it exchanges its readings with the nodes in same geographical area rather than exchanging too much messages after every specific interval as in other DFDs. The scheme utilizes the strength of both spatial and temporal correlation to find faulty nodes and reduces the message overhead during fault detection. The ns-2 based simulation results show that our scheme performs better by reducing communication overhead and detects faulty nodes with high accuracy as compared to existing DFD.