Bayesian Network Based Fault Tolerance in Distributed Sensor Networks

A Distributed Sensor Network (DSN) consists of a set of sensors that are interconnected by a communication network. DSN is capable of acquiring and processing signals, communicating, and performing simple computational tasks. Such sensors can detect and collect data concerning any sign of node failure, earthquakes, floods and even a terrorist attack. Energy efficiency and fault-tolerance network control are the most important issues in the development of DSNs. In this work, two methods of fault tolerance are proposed: fault detection and recovery to achieve fault tolerance using Bayesian Networks (BNs). Bayesian Network is used to aid reasoning and decision making under uncertainty. The main objective of this work is to provide fault tolerance mechanism which is energy efficient and responsive to network using BNs. It is also used to detect energy depletion of node, link failure between nodes, and packet error in DSN. The proposed model is used to detect faults at node, sink and network level faults (link failure and packet error). The proposed fault recovery model is used to achieve fault tolerance by adjusting the network of the randomly deployed sensor nodes based on of its probabilities. Finally, the performance parameters for the proposed scheme are evaluated. Keywords—Bayesian network, distributed sensor networks, fault detection, fault tolerance, fault recovery, network control, routing.