A New Distributed Fault Detection Method for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this article, a new distributed fault detection method based on the nodes' importance in maintaining connectivity of the network is proposed for wireless sensor networks (WSN). Given that the effect of nodes is different on the connectivity of WSN, the proposed method tries to identify the high local importance nodes and keep these nodes in the network as much as possible. In addition, in the proposed method, the probabilistic and deterministic status of the sensor nodes is determined by analyzing the differences between data of neighboring nodes. Extensive simulations have carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method in various scenarios in terms of the detection accuracy and false alarm rate. Moreover, analysis of time complexity and message complexity indicates that the overhead of the proposed method is lower than the counterpart approaches.