Department Electronic Engineering, University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien, 1200 Vienna, Austria.
Automation Systems Group, Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien, 1040 Vienna, Austria.
Sensors (Basel). 2021 Nov 16;21(22):7613. doi: 10.3390/s21227613.
In wireless sensor networks, the quality of the provided data is influenced by the properties of the sensor nodes. Often deployed in large numbers, they usually consist of low-cost components where failures are the norm, even more so in harsh outdoor environments. Current fault detection techniques, however, consider the sensor data alone and neglect vital information from the nodes' hard- and software. As a consequence, they can not distinguish between rare data anomalies caused by proper events in the sensed data on one side and fault-induced data distortion on the other side. In this paper, we contribute with a novel, open-source sensor node platform for monitoring applications such as environmental monitoring. For long battery life, it comprises mainly low-power components. In contrast to other sensor nodes, our platform provides self-diagnostic measures to enable active node-level reliability. The entire sensor node platform including the hardware and software components has been implemented and is publicly available and free to use for everyone. Based on an extensive and long-running practical experiment setup, we show that the detectability of node faults is improved and the distinction between rare but proper events and fault-induced data distortion is indeed possible. We also show that these measures have a negligible overhead on the node's energy efficiency and hardware costs. This improves the overall reliability of wireless sensor networks with both, long battery life and high-quality data.
在无线传感器网络中，提供的数据质量受到传感器节点的属性影响。这些节点通常大量部署，由低成本组件构成，故障很常见，尤其是在恶劣的户外环境中。然而，当前的故障检测技术仅考虑传感器数据，而忽略了节点软硬件的重要信息。因此，它们无法区分传感器数据中因正常事件导致的罕见数据异常和因故障引起的数据失真。在本文中，我们贡献了一个新颖的、开源的传感器节点平台，用于环境监测等监控应用。为了实现长电池寿命，它主要由低功耗组件构成。与其他传感器节点不同，我们的平台提供了自诊断措施，以实现主动节点级别的可靠性。整个传感器节点平台，包括硬件和软件组件，已经实现并可供所有人免费使用。基于广泛且长期的实际实验设置，我们表明可以提高节点故障的检测能力，并可以区分罕见但正常的事件和故障引起的数据失真。我们还表明，这些措施对节点的能量效率和硬件成本几乎没有开销。这提高了无线传感器网络的整体可靠性，同时延长了电池寿命并保证了高质量的数据。
