Distributed Faulty Node Detection in DTNs

Due to their inherent feature of exhibiting frequent disconnections, propagation of faulty data in Delay Tolerant Networks can be a critical aspect to counteract. Indeed the rare meeting events require that nodes are effective and efficient in propagating the correct information. Accordingly mechanisms to rapidly identify possible faulty or misbehaving nodes should be searched. Distributed fault detection has been addressed in the literature in the context of sensor and vehicular networks, but unfortunately these solutions suffer for long delays in identifying and isolating misbehaving nodes. In this paper instead we propose a fully distributed, easily implementable, and fast convergent approach to allow each DTN node to rapidly identify whether its sensors are producing outliers. The behavior of the proposed algorithm is described by some continuous-time state equation, whose equilibrium is characterized. Detection and false alarm rates are estimated by comparing both theoretical and simulation results. Numerical results assess the effectiveness of the proposed solution and can give guidelines in the design of the algorithm.