Comparison-based system-level fault diagnosis in Ad Hoc networks

The problem of identifying faulty mobiles in ad-hoc networks is considered. Current diagnostic models were designed for wired networks, thus they do not take advantage of the shared nature of communication typical of ad-hoc networks. In this paper we introduce a new comparison-based diagnostic model based on the one-tomany communication paradigm. Two implementations of the model are presented. In the first implementation, we assume that the network topology does not change during diagnosis, and we show that both hard and soft faults can be easily detected. Based on this implementation, a diagnosis protocol is presented. The evaluation of the communication and time complexity of the protocol indicates that efficient diagnosis protocols for ad-hoc networks based on our model can be designed. In the second implementation we allow the system topology to change during diagnosis. As expected, the ability of diagnosing faults under this scenario is significantly reduced with respect to the stationary case.