MDFD and DFD Methods to detect Failed Sensor Nodes in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) contains many low cost and low power sensor nodes (SNs), these nodes may fail to communicate with each other according to some reasons such as battery lifetime or uncontrolled events which will lead to partition the network and reduce the Quality of Service (QoS) as well as the reliability and efficiency of the whole network. The motivation of this paper is detecting these malfunctions using Distributed Fault Detection (DFD) method considered with random proposed network model. Then a modification on DFD method (MDFD) proposed to enhance the efficiency and the reliability of the whole network and handling the error occurred with DFD method. The two methods analyzed and tested using MATLAB ® and they must applied with homogeneous WSNs only that contain only one type of sensors, percentage error of DFD method was about 25% (for three SNs) due to its algorithm limitations in using only half of the neighbor SNs, this percentage error reduced in MDFD method in which all neighbor SNs considered to detect the failed SN reaching full detection accuracy but with latency tradeoff.