Distributed Fault Detection Based on Credibility and Cooperation for WSNs in Smart Grids

Due to the increasingly important role in monitoring and data collection that sensors play, accurate and timely fault detection is a key issue for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in smart grids. This paper presents a novel distributed fault detection mechanism for WSNs based on credibility and cooperation. Firstly, a reasonable credibility model of a sensor is established to identify any suspicious status of the sensor according to its own temporal data correlation. Based on the credibility model, the suspicious sensor is then chosen to launch fault diagnosis requests. Secondly, the sending time of fault diagnosis request is discussed to avoid the transmission overhead brought about by unnecessary diagnosis requests and improve the efficiency of fault detection based on neighbor cooperation. The diagnosis reply of a neighbor sensor is analyzed according to its own status. Finally, to further improve the accuracy of fault detection, the diagnosis results of neighbors are divided into several classifications to judge the fault status of the sensors which launch the fault diagnosis requests. Simulation results show that this novel mechanism can achieve high fault detection ratio with a small number of fault diagnoses and low data congestion probability.