Fault Monitoring in Ad-Hoc Networks based on Information Theory
Abstract
Fault detection is a well-known issue in fixed wired networks. Ad-hoc networks provide new challenges towards detecting network failures: the detection task may be hindered by the impossibility to observe a given node. We propose in this paper to monitor the intermittence of network nodes in order to infer network failures. Intermittence can be caused in ad-hoc networks by benign causes due to node mobility and to time-limited out of reachability situations. Abnormal intermittence is however due to faults or malicious network activities. This paper shows how information theoretic measures can identify abnormal intermittence over the routing layer, and proposes a lightweight and distributed intermittence monitoring scheme including several fault detection.