Auto-configurable, self-healing distributed wireless sensor networks supporting high dependability for critical applications.

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are becoming an ubiquitous technology with remarkable applications on monitoring systems, surveillance, process automation, and emergency assistance for disaster relief. These networks usually require properties such as self-configurability and self-healing, scalability, energy efficiency. Typically, WSNs use best effort strategies to fulfill these requirements, and this is adequate for some applications. However, for use in the fields of e.g. industrial automation, monitoring of critical infrastructures or cyber physical systems (CPS), wireless sensor networks with deterministic behavior and high resilience are needed. Automation systems based on WSNs need deterministic properties and dependable data channels. Node or link failures or incorrect data can result in improper actions. To make wireless sensor networks suitable for critical application scenarios, their resilience have to be significantly improved. Resilience of a network is defined as the persistence of service delivery that can justifiably be trusted, when facing changes. ¿Challenge-Tolerance¿ means the ability of a network to tolerate node faults or link disruptions. All capabilities of networks to deal with faults belong to this category. It includes the ability of a network to deal with failures of links and/or nodes. Furthermore, it also covers the ability to deal with erroneous behavior of nodes. Measures to increase challenge-tolerance fall into three categories: (a) Increase survivability, (b) Increase ¿disruption tolerance¿; and (c) Increase ¿traffic tolerance¿. ¿Trustworthiness¿is a set of quantifiable properties and splits up in the following three categories: (a) Dependability; (b) Security; and (c) Performance. The resulting robustness of the WSN is the trustworthiness of the network confronted with above mentioned challenges.