Fault tolerance in multisensor networks

Replicating sensors is desirable, not only to tolerate sensor failures, but to increase the average accuracy of the ensemble of replicated sensors beyond that obtainable with a single sensor. Such replication is used in a multi-sensor environment or in a distributed-sensor network. Following Marzullo (1990), the authors have modeled a continuous valued sensor as an interval of real numbers containing the physical value of interest. Given n sensors of which at most f can suffer arbitrary failures, this paper presents an efficient O(n/spl middot/log(n)) fault-tolerant algorithm (J/FTA) whose output is reliable (guaranteed to contain the correct value at all times) and is fairly accurate when f