A trust-based distributed data fault detection algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Fault detection is a difficult and complex task in WSN because of there are many factors that influence data and could cause faults. Large-scale sensor networks impose energy and communication constraints, thus it is difficult to collect data from each individual sensor node and process it at the sink to detect faulty sensors. The proposed approach saves energy and improves network lifetime by detecting data faults locally in cluster head and therefore reducing the number of transmissions required to convey relevant information to the sink. This paper presents a novel approach for detecting sensors which produce faulty data in a distributed way as well as identifying the type of data faults using trust concepts to gain a high degree of confidence. We validate our method with simulations results.