Effective but Lightweight Online Selftest for Energy-Constrained WSNs

In real world Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications nodes can be affected by soft errors that occur either accidentally or are introduced deliberately. Especially when WSNs are deployed outdoors harsh environmental conditions may impair the proper function of devices. However, soft errors might also be provoked intentionally to increase the energy efficiency of nodes when, e.g., undervolting is applied. In any case the detection of an error is essential as small failures could propagate throughout the system and downgrade the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire network. Hence, this paper presents an approach to detect errors with minor overhead, independent from the used micro controller unit (MCU) and with a high effectiveness. To perform an extensive evaluation we implemented automatic test equipment to enable the investigation on different types of MCUs. The results show that our approach outperforms classical approaches while not being hardware-dependent.