A survey on diagnosis in wireless sensor networks

PhD Qualifying Examination


Title: "A survey on diagnosis in wireless sensor networks"

by

Mr. Qiang MA


Abstract:

Recent technological advances on embedded system and wireless
communication have promoted the development of low-cost, low-power,
and multifunctional sensor devices. These nodes are autonomous devices
with integrated sensing, processing and communication capabilities. In
general, wireless sensor networks are used to fetch information on
spatio-temporal characteristics of the observed physical world,
spawning numerous unforeseen applications. Due to the special nature
of the deployment environment and sensor node’s intrinsic instability,
network failure happens unpredictably. Besides, A number of
applications, such as ecological habitat monitoring and accident
detection, inherently rely on persistent and instantaneous sensing
data. Hence, it proves necessary to associate sensing work and network
management, making the network system more reliable and sustainable.
Therefore, Network diagnosis, a process of deducing the exact root
cause of a failure from a set of observed failure indications, becomes
of great importance in the development of wireless sensor networks.

This survey reviews diverse diagnosis approaches for sensor nodes,
discusses issues about network diagnosis and management, presents the
state-of-the-art diagnosis techniques, and finally suggests future
directions in diagnosis studies. In general, two types of faults would
lead to performance degradation in wireless sensor network. One type
is called function fault, including network partition, routing
failure, node contention and so on. By specifying different diagnosis
granularity, this survey in depth elaborates and classifies existing
approaches of troubleshooting function fault into three categories:
entity-level diagnosis, status-level diagnosis and source-level
debugger. The other type is data fault, in which a node behaves
normally in network functions, but fails to fetch or process its
sensing data, thus makes either critical biased or just random errors.
The design tradeoffs of diagnosis approaches, as well as their
overhead, coupling degree with network, pros and cons, are emphasized
for comparison. Actually, among these diagnosis techniques, no
specific design seems the clear favorite across the spectrum. In
conclusion, network diagnosis and management plays an important role
in development of wireless sensor network now as well as in the
future, with new diagnosis approaches, system tools and requirements
being developed at a feverish pace.


Date:                   Tuesday, 11 January 2011

Time:                   5:00pm - 7:00pm

Venue:                  Room 3501
                         lifts 25/26

Committee Members:	Dr. Yunhao Liu (Supervisor)
 			Prof. Lionel Ni (Chairperson)
 			Dr. Lei Chen
 			Dr. Lin Gu


**** ALL are Welcome ****