Detection and diagnosis of data inconsistency failures in wireless sensor networks

  • Authors:
  • Kuo-Feng Ssu;Chih-Hsun Chou;Hewijin Christine Jiau;Wei-Te Hu

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Electrical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, ROC;Department of Electrical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, ROC;Department of Electrical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, ROC;Springsoft Inc., Hsinchu, Taiwan, ROC and Department of Electrical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, ROC

  • Venue:
  • Computer Networks: The International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Most fault-tolerant schemes for wireless sensor networks focus on power failures or crash faults. Little attention has been paid to the data inconsistency failures which occur when the binary contents of a data packet are changed during processing. In this event, a faulty node may produce incorrect data and transmit them to other sensors. Hence, erroneous results are propagated throughout the entire network and the sink may make inappropriate decisions as a result. Accordingly, this study proposes a mechanism which can both tolerate and locate data inconsistency failures in sensor networks. Node-disjoint paths and an automatic diagnosis scheme are utilized to identify the faulty sensor nodes. The proposed mechanism was implemented with the ns-2 simulator. The evaluation results demonstrate the ability of the mechanism to identify faulty nodes efficiently and with limited overheads. Using the scheme, more than 99.99% of the inconsistent data packets were successfully detected by the sink.