A Real Time Centralized Fault Detection Application in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are usually composed of autonomous nodes. Each networked node constructs its own neighbor table, routing table, and schedules internal tasks on its own. However, this process may be slow, and is errorprone because the constrained sensor nodes cannot be expected to constantly police all their neighbors and consequently may end up routing into a new neighbor that has also failed. Centralized fault detection based on clustering approach has become an emerging technology for building scalable and energy balanced applications for WSNs. In our work, we try to apply the Distributed Fault Detection (DFD) algorithm in a True Time simulator based on clustering model where the cluster head or the sink node detects the suspicious nodes by exchanging heartbeat messages in active manner. By analyzing the collected heartbeat information, the cluster head finally identifies failed nodes according to a pre-defined failure detection rule.. (Abstract)