Research of a low-cost localised fault algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Because of its small, flexibility, low cost and unattended, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used in environmental monitor, healthcare, smart home, military fields, and so on. The faults are common due to the bad environment and unattended. In order to ensure WSNs' service is normal, it is necessary to detect the faults and locate the faulty sensors. In this paper, the basic method of fault localisation using active probing is studied, the key problems of active probing are analysed, and some effective solutions to these problems are provided. Firstly, based on adjacent matrix, probe stations are selected, and designed a maximal greedy algorithm to minimise probe sets. Secondly, binary search method is used to locate the faulty sensor quickly. Lastly, an algorithm to identify the faulty sensors is proposed and evaluated. Fault detection precision is very high, and the implementation complexity of the algorithm is very low, easily implemented in hardware.