Fault Detection in Wireless Sensor Networks through the Random Forest Classifier

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are vulnerable to faults because of their deployment in unpredictable and hazardous environments. This makes WSN prone to failures such as software, hardware, and communication failures. Due to the sensor’s limited resources and diverse deployment fields, fault detection in WSNs has become a daunting task. To solve this problem, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Random Forest (RF), and Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) classifiers are used for classification of gain, offset, spike, data loss, out of bounds, and stuck-at faults at the sensor level. Out of six faults, two of them are induced in the datasets, i.e., spike and data loss faults. The results are compared on the basis of their Detection Accuracy (DA), True Positive Rate (TPR), Matthews Correlation Coefficients (MCC), and F1-score. In this paper, a comparative analysis is performed among the classifiers mentioned previously on real-world datasets. Simulations show that the RF algorithm secures a better fault detection rate than the rest of the classifiers.