A Fault-aware Sensor Architecture for Cooperative Mobile Applications

One of the striking characteristics of mobile embedded systems is the interaction with the physical world. Prerequisite for this interaction is the reliable perception of the environment by sensors. Exploiting remote sensors of an instrumented environment and other mobile systems will extend the range and modalities of sensing and, in principle, will contribute to a better environment perception. However, such as distributed sensor system also puts new substantial challenges on the assessment and dynamic use of sensor data. This paper focus on dependability issues and presents a fault abstraction and fault-handling concept, that encapsulates individual sensor faults and encourages multi-level fault detection. Based on an analysis of sensor faults, our approach generates a validation for each sensor measurement. This allows assessing remote sensor data quality in a uniform way and provides the basis for a distributed mobile application in which new sensor sources can be discovered and exploited dynamically.