Distributed Faulty Node Detection in Delay Tolerant Networks: Design and Analysis

Propagation of faulty data is a critical issue. In case of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) in particular, the rare meeting events require that nodes are efficient in propagating only correct information. For that purpose, mechanisms to rapidly identify possible faulty nodes should be developed. Distributed faulty node detection has been addressed in the literature in the context of sensor and vehicular networks, but already proposed solutions suffer from long delays in identifying and isolating nodes producing faulty data. This is unsuitable to DTNs where nodes meet only rarely. This paper proposes a fully distributed and easily implementable approach to allow each DTN node to rapidly identify whether its sensors are producing faulty data. The dynamical behavior of the proposed algorithm is approximated by some continuous-time state equations, whose equilibrium is characterized. The presence of misbehaving nodes, trying to perturb the faulty node detection process, is also taken into account. 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 be used to give guidelines for the algorithm design.