Blind Sensor Calibration using Approximate Message Passing

The ubiquity of approximately sparse data has led a variety of com- munities to great interest in compressed sensing algorithms. Although these are very successful and well understood for linear measurements with additive noise, applying them on real data can be problematic if imperfect sensing devices introduce deviations from this ideal signal ac- quisition process, caused by sensor decalibration or failure. We propose a message passing algorithm called calibration approximate message passing (Cal-AMP) that can treat a variety of such sensor-induced imperfections. In addition to deriving the general form of the algorithm, we numerically investigate two particular settings. In the first, a fraction of the sensors is faulty, giving readings unrelated to the signal. In the second, sensors are decalibrated and each one introduces a different multiplicative gain to the measures. Cal-AMP shares the scalability of approximate message passing, allowing to treat big sized instances of these problems, and ex- perimentally exhibits a phase transition between domains of success and failure.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figure

Detecting Faulty Wireless Sensor Nodes through Stochastic Classification

In many distributed systems, the possibility to adapt the behavior of the involved resources in response to unforeseen failures is an important requirement in order to significantly reduce the costs of management. Autonomous detection of faulty entities, however, is often a challenging task, especially when no direct human intervention is possible, as is the case for many scenarios involving Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), which usually operate in inaccessible and hostile environments. This paper presents an unsupervised approach for identifying faulty sensor nodes within a WSN. The proposed algorithm uses a probabilistic approach based on Markov Random Fields, requiring exclusively an analysis of the sensor readings, thus avoiding additional control overhead. In particular, abnormal behavior of a sensor node will be inferred by analyzing the spatiotemporal correlation of its data with respect to its neighborhood. The algorithm is tested on a public dataset, over which different classes of faults were artificially superimposed