Guided Identification of Failed Nodes Based on Failure Presentation

Sensor nodes and Internet of Things devices may experience long-term loss of functional roles. The objective of this article is to efficiently identify the failed sensors in a large-scale sensor network. The problem addressed is overcoming information constraints in identifying the location of a failed sensor using only local interactions between low-cost sensors and a network maintainer. The proposed method in this article allows the sensors to self-organize into a functional structure in which a supporting sensor set facilitates the autonomous maintainer (AM) to find the failed sensors. The supporting sensor set presents the failure information to the AM, which then rescales its search area for quick discovery of the failed sensor. Both a qualitative analysis and simulation evaluation are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The results show that an appropriate presenting area of the failed sensor facilitates fast and localized discovery of failed sensors by the AM.