Prevalence of Anomalies in Real World Sensor Network Deployments
Giovani Rimon Abuaitah, Bin Wang · Advances in wireless technologies and telecommunication book series · 2015
Sensor network deployments have enabled automated data collection at a finer granularity compared to human-centric sparse deployments of traditional telemetric data loggers. However, this fine granularity cannot be achieved in the presence of failing nodes, frequent network failures, and/or potentially malicious network behaviors. Moreover, given a perfect and secure network with long-lived sensor nodes, the collected sensor data should be fault-free to guarantee quality of reasoning. Unlike traditional devices, wireless sensor motes are resource-constrained battery-powered devices equipped with few on-board sensors which are susceptible to failures, and batteries cannot always be reliably recharged. Over the years, sensor network deployments have materialized a large number of monitoring and event-detection applications. Researchers and decision makers have observed several anomalous patterns ranging from functional failures to pervasive sensing faults in most of these deployments. In this chapter, we discuss a few of these deployments to emphasize the need for an anomaly detection mechanism.