Probabilistic fault detector for Wireless Sensor Network

•The end-to-end transmission time is utilized for WSN hardware fault detection.•Advanced Naïve Bayes classifier is implemented as the fault detector.•Simulations verify the effectiveness of the approach with comparisons. This paper proposed a novel centralized hardware fault detection approach for a structured Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) based on Naïve Bayes framework. For most WSNs, power supply is the main constraint of the network because most applications are in severe situation and the sensors are equipped with battery only. In other words, the battery’s life is the network’s life. To maximize the network’s life, the proposed method, Centralized Naïve Bayes Detector (CNBD) analyzes the end-to-end transmission time collected at the sink. Thus all the computation will not be performed in individual sensor node that poses no additional power burden to the battery of each sensor node. We have conducted thorough performance evaluation. The obtained results showed better performance can be obtained under a network size of 100-node WSN simulations at various network traffic conditions and different number of faulty nodes.