On the Effects of Transfaulty Sensor Nodes in Stationary Wireless Sensor Network Systems

Due to less propagation delay and high bandwidth, radio frequency (RF) signal is generally used for communication between nodes in a wireless sensor network (WSN). These RF-based wireless sensor nodes suffer from communication impairment in the presence of external electromagnetic or nuclear radiation. Temporal presence of such external radiations leads to exhibit dynamic failure nature of sensor nodes in the WSN. When a sensor node cannot temporarily communicate with other nodes in the WSN in the presence of external radiation is termed as transfaulty node. These nodes typically resume their normal operation after the resumption of favorable (normal) conditions. The transfaulty sensor nodes may able to sense their surrounding correctly but cannot communicate with others temporarily. As a result, the transfaulty sensor nodes create dynamic communication holes, which create or remove and increase or decrease in their size during network operation. The temporal communication failure nature of transfaulty nodes impose detrimental effects on the network performance of the WSN. Therefore, this behavior is considered as temporary misbehavior of wireless sensor nodes. In this paper, we study the affects of transfaulty nodes on a stationary WSN. Simulation results show that the network performance degrades in the presence of transfaulty nodes in stationary WSNs. Hence, we also suggest some suitable remedies to restore the network performance of WSN in the presence of transfaulty nodes.