SDH: Self Detection and Healing mechanism for dumb nodes in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

In real life deployment, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) often experience adverse environmental conditions. Due to these adverse environmental conditions sensor nodes can behave as dumb. Dumb nature is a temporary misbehavior of a sensor node caused by the temporal nature of adverse environmental conditions. In this paper, we present a Self Detection and Healing (SDH) mechanism to overcome the existence of such misbehaving nodes. Self detection mechanism brings environmental awareness to the nodes. Whereas, Self healing infers and applies the most suitable transmission parameters under the above said environmental conditions. Performance analysis shows that self detection mechanism can work with more than 80% accuracy in all test cases. On the other hand, self healing can increase 67% network throughput by overcoming the existence of dumb nodes. Self detection and healing is also an energy efficient solution. It consumes 25% less power than the distributed approach of dumb node detection.