Fault diagnosis and its prediction in wireless sensor networks using regressional learning to achieve fault tolerance.

Summary: Due to the wide range of critical applications and resource constraints, sensor node gives unexpected responses, which leads to various kind of faults in sensor node and failure in wireless sensor networks. Many research studies focus only on fault diagnosis, and comparatively limited studies have been conducted on fault diagnosis along with fault tolerance in sensor networks. This paper reports a complete study on both 2 aspects and presents a fault tolerance approach using regressional learning with fault diagnosis in wireless sensor networks. The proposed method diagnose the different types of faulty nodes such as hard permanent, soft permanent, intermittent, and transient faults with better detection accuracy. The proposed method follows a fault tolerance phase where faulty sensor node values would be predicted by using the data sensed by the fault free neighbors. The experimental evaluation of the fault tolerance module shows promising results with R² of more than 0.99. For the periodic fault such as intermittent fault, the proposed method also predict the possible occurrence time and its duration of the faulty node, so that fault tolerance can be achieved at that particular time period for better performance of the network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]