Fault detection modelling and analysis in a wireless sensor network

For the serious impacts of network failure caused by the unbalanced energy consumption of sensor nodes, hardware failure, and attacker intrusion on data transmission, a low-energy-consumption distributed fault detection mechanism in a wireless sensor network (LEFD) is proposed in this paper. The time correlation information of nodes is used to detect fault nodes in LEFD firstly, and then the spatial correlation information is adopted to detect the remaining fault nodes, so as to check the states of nodes comprehensively and improve the efficiency of data transmission. In addition, the nodes do not need to exchange information with their neighbor nodes in the detection process since LEFD uses the data sensed by the node itself to detect some types of faults, thus reducing the energy consumption of nodes effectively. Performance analysis and simulation results show that the proposed detection mechanism can improve the transmission performance and reduce the energy consumption of the network effectively.