Energy Efficient Distributed Fault Identification Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Networks

A distributed fault identification algorithm is proposed here to find both hard and soft faulty sensor nodes present in wireless sensor networks. The algorithm is distributed, self-detectable, and can detect the most common byzantine faults such as stuck at zero, stuck at one, and random data. In the proposed approach, each sensor node gathered the observed data from the neighbors and computed the mean to check whether faulty sensor node is present or not. If a node found the presence of faulty sensor node, then compares observed data with the data of the neighbors and predict probable fault status. The final fault status is determined by diffusing the fault information from the neighbors. The accuracy and completeness of the algorithm are verified with the help of statistical model of the sensors data. The performance is evaluated in terms of detection accuracy, false alarm rate, detection latency and message complexity.