Obstacle-Aware Intelligent Fault Detection Scheme for Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Nowadays, the demand for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology has increased immensely in various fields, such as the agriculture industry, smart mines, smart factories, healthcare industry, etc. Industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) act as a backbone of any IIoT system by forming a network of heterogeneous sensors. In IWSNs, the fault occurrence probability is more due to continuous exposure to harsh environments. Furthermore, the presence of obstacles creates an extra burden in fault detection. In this article, the proposed scheme presents an optimal fault diagnostic point selection mechanism that significantly reduces fault detection latency and energy consumption. Multiple intelligent mobile fault detectors effectively avoid obstacles during the fault detection process that significantly improves fault detection accuracy (FDA). Extensive simulations and a testbed experiment demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of FDA, false alarm rate, false positive rate, F1-score, energy consumption, and network lifetime.