A Survey on Fault Diagnosis in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) often consist of hundreds of sensor nodes that may be deployed in relatively harsh and complex environments. In views of hardware cost, sensor nodes always adopt relatively cheap chips, which makes these nodes become error-prone or faulty in the course of their operation. Natural factors and electromagnetic interference could also influence the performance of the WSNs. When sensor nodes become faulty, they may have died which means they cannot communicate with other members in the wireless network, they may be still alive but produce incorrect data, they may be unstable jumping between normal state and faulty state. To improve data quality, shorten response time, strengthen network security, and prolong network lifespan, many studies have focused on fault diagnosis. This survey paper classifies fault diagnosis methods in recent five years into three categories based on decision centers and key attributes of employed algorithms: centralized approaches, distributed approaches, and hybrid approaches. As all these studies have specific goals and limitations, this paper tries to compare them, lists their merits and limits, and propose potential research directions based on established methods and theories.