TOSSIM and distributed binary consensus algorithm in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In this paper, we present distributed binary consensus algorithm over the wireless sensor networks (WSN) in the presence of faulty nodes. We assume that each fault occurs during the execution of an algorithm on a sensor node. With binary consensus, each sensor node, initially, observes one of two states TRUE and FALSE and the aim is to decide which one of the two states was held by the majority of the nodes. The nodes exchange their measurements and each one updates its state according to the state communicated by the last contacted node. We propose the implementation of the distributed binary consensus algorithm in WSN when the network contains t faulty nodes. The implementation was tested on sensor nodes using the TinyOSSimulator (TOSSIM) for a WSN with a large number of nodes. This ensures that the simulation is more close to the real environment. It also guarantees that the code performs correctly when deployed on the physical nodes. In order to evaluate the performance of the distributed system, we consider the analysis of the average convergence time over a simulated environment such as TOSSIM and considering the presence of malicious nodes. These results are presented for a WSN with different topologies such as fully connected, path, ring, Erdos Reny random, and star-shaped.