Ss. Iyengar et al., A VERSATILE ARCHITECTURE FOR THE DISTRIBUTED SENSOR INTEGRATION PROBLEM, I.E.E.E. transactions on computers, 43(2), 1994, pp. 175-185
The computational issues related to information integration in multise
nsor systems and distributed sensor networks has become an active area
of research. From a computational viewpoint, the efficient extraction
of information from noisy and faulty signals emanating from many sens
ors requires the solution of problems related a) to the architecture a
nd fault tolerance of the distributed sensor network, b) to the proper
synchronization of sensor signals, and c) to the integration of infor
mation to keep the communication and the centralized processing requir
ements small. In this paper, we propose a versatile architecture for a
distributed sensor network which consists of a multilevel network wit
h the nodes.(processing element/sensor pairs) at each level interconne
cted as a deBruijn network. We show that this multilevel network has r
easonable fault tolerance, admits simple and decentralized routing, an
d offers easy extensibility. We model information from sensors as real
valued intervals and derive an interesting property related to inform
ation integration in the presence of faults. Using this property, the
search for a fault is narrowed down to two potentially faulty sensors
or communication links. In a distributed environment, information has
to be integrated from ''temporally close'' signals in the presence of
imperfect clocks in a distributed environment. We apply the results of
past research in this area to state various relationships between the
clocks of the processing elements in the network for proper informati
on integration.