2018 Wireless Days (WD)
An Artificial Neural Network Based Fault Detection
and Diagnosis for Wireless Mesh Networks
Akmal Yaqini
Communication and Operating Systems
Technische Universität Berlin
Berlin, Germany
Email:yaqini@win.tu-berlin.de
Abstract—Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a wireless com-
munication technology that has many advantageous character-
istics such as dynamic self-organization, self-configuration, self-
healing, high scalability and reliable services coverage. However,
wireless mesh links frequently experience quality variations and
undesirable performance or poor connectivity. In this paper we
propose a fault detection and diagnosis approach for enhancing
performance of WMNs based on Artificial Neural Networks
(ANN). The artificial neural network is trained to detect and
classify individual or composite faults. We consider node failure,
link failure and traffic congestion as the target faults. The
approach is implemented in NS3 network simulator and its
performance is evaluated considering detection rate, false positive
and false negative.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is a new wireless tech-
nology that is suitable to qualify the high demand of con-
nectivity today. Even though WMNs possess qualities such as
dynamic self-management and flexibility, frequent link quality
variations and undesirable performance has limited their wider
deployment and application.
The existing fault detection approaches for WMNs are not
efficient enough to detect and classify faults. This makes the
fault recovery process costly and complex specially when the
network in state of composite faults [5], [6], [7]. To optimize
the capacity of WMNs it is necessary to detect faults and
increase the pace of network’s recovery process to make
the network operate efficiently even in complex situations.
Therefore, to contribute in the area of fault detection and
diagnosis and overcome the limitations in existing approaches
and in WMNs, we propose an Artificial Neural Network
(ANN) based fault detection and diagnosis approach. We use
the back-propagation learning algorithm to train our ANN to
detect and classify faults in WMN. We use the event data and
network statistics that are produced during network operation
and due to changes in the network as dataset for training the
ANN. Once learned, the ANN is able to detect, classify faults
in the network. To the best of our knowledge there is no
existing fault detection and diagnosis approach in the research
domain of WMNs that is based on ANN. Hence, our proposed
approach is novel in this essence.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section II
presents the related work. In section III a brief description of
978-1-5386-5633-4/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
Freshta Popalyar
Communication and Operating Systems
Technische Universität Berlin
Berlin, Germany
Email:popalyar@win.tu-berlin.de
Artificial Neural Network is provided. Section IV describes the
proposed approach. Performance analysis results are presented
in section V and section VI concludes the paper.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Li Xu et al, have proposed a fault diagnosis model for
WMNs [1] using shortest path spanning tree algorithm to
diagnose faults in the network. In their approach all mesh
routers build a fault tree based on shortest path spanning
tree and every node in the tree has the shortest path to the
root based on hop count. The authors have stated that they
have prevented the overhead of maintaining and repairing the
spanning tree which in turn has made communication more
efficient and reduced complexity.
Li et al, have proposed W-C4.5-RP mechanism which is a
fault diagnosis model based on decision tree algorithm [2]. The
authors have employed rule post-pruning to improve the C4.5
decision tree algorithm. They have compared both algorithms
in regards with accuracy rate and the results that they perform
nearly the same. The authors have shown that using W-C4.5-
RP decreases the size of rule set which in turn reduces the
matching time for rules. They have considered DoS attack
and power down attack in their approach as faults.
Moustapha et.al [3] have proposed wireless sensor networks
(WSNs) modeling using modified recurrent neural networks
and its application to node failure detection. The inputs to the
neural network are taken from the nodes that are modeled and
from neighboring nodes. The authors have used received signal
strength based confidence factors to model communication
uncertainties. The approach is compared with Kalman filtering
technique based approach. The simulation results show the
proposed scheme is more efficient.
Jabbari et al. [4] use a modified version of Probabilistic
Neural Networks (PNN) for fault detection in sensor net-
works. Their proposed approach is called Fault Detection
and Isolation (FDI). They used two types of neural network
architectures to generate and compare measurement residuals.
The authors have first employed an ANN to generate residuals
by comparing measurement with temperature values and sec-
ondly, they have used a PNN to detect faults and classify them
accordingly. Their approach was able to differentiate between
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 2018 Wireless Days (WD)
normal and faulty transducers by combining current tempera-
ture measurements and additional environment information.
III. BACKGROUND
The notion of Artificial Neural Network is based on neural
network in human body. ANN is made of a number of
interconnected neurons that process information to provide the
expected solution of a problem. There are two types of ANN;
feed-forward and recurrent neural networks. The recurrent
neural network’s structure is similar to a cyclic graph in which
the signals can loop in the network. On the contrary feed-
forward neural networks do not form any loops. Feed-forward
neural networks are also called multilayer perceptrons because
they are consisted of an input layer, one or multiple hidden
layers and an output layer [10].
The ANN takes n number of inputs Xi with associated
weights Wi and computes the sum nof the product of given
inputs and their weights as z = i=1 Xi · Wi The function
will return 1 if the value fed to it is greater than or equal to
a threshold and otherwise it will return 0 [9].
The back-propagation algorithm in ANN is used to solve
complex and non-linear problems. The back-propagation al-
gorithm works by gradually computing the errors from the
input layer to the output layer and propagate the error back to
the previous layer to update the weights. [9]. The algorithm
back-propagates the value using gradient descent G which
is the derivative of the activation function f with respect to
the weights. With every iteration of the process the error is
minimized and the output gets closer to the desired output
[10].
n
1
E= (Desiredoutput − Obtainedoutput ) (1)
2 i=1
δE
G= (2)
δwij
The most commonly used activation function in feed-forward
multilayer perceptron networks is the logistic/sigmoid function
[10] displayed as follows:
1 face problems such as interference, limited bandwidth, unpre-
f (z) = (3)
1 − e−z
The following formula shows the updated weights:
Δwij = −η · E · G + α · Δwij (n − 1) (4)
where, η is the momentum and α is the learning rate and n−1
is the previous layer. The values of momentum and learning
rate are given by trial and error approaches. If momentum is
too high the network moves fast and cannot learn correctly and
if it is too low causes the network to back-propagate slower.
Similarly, an α value too high makes the network to over-
learn and produce false results. Relatively a too low learning
rate makes the network lazy to learn. An ANN works in two
phases; training and testing. A vector of input values and its
desired output value is passed to the neural network in the
training phase. The network learns normal and anomalous
states of the system and in the testing phase the network
delivers results based on the learned information.
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IV. T HE P ROPOSED A PPROACH
To contribute in the area of fault detection and diagnosis in
WMNs we propose a fault detection and diagnosis approach
based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANN). To the best of our
knowledge none of the existing fault detection approaches in
the literature have employed ANN in the area of fault detection
and diagnosis in WMNs. Furthermore, the existing approaches
deal with single type of faults whereas our proposed approach
is able to detect individual and composite faults as well as
classifying them. In this approach we consider three faults;
1) node failure, 2) link failure and 3) traffic congestion. The
ANN designed in this approach detects and classifies the faults
by learning the normal and faulty status of the WMN. In the
training phase we pass a vector of inputs and desired output
values to the ANN and in the testing phase the ANN delivers
learned results. We use the back-propagation algorithm to
train the ANN. We use the sigmoid function as the activation
function in the back-propagation algorithm.
A. Network and Fault Model
We consider a backbone WMN which is decentralized and
infrastructure-based. The components of the network include
Gateways, Mesh Routers where some of the routers have
moderate level of mobility.
We have distinguished WMNs faults in the following cate-
gories: Node failure, communication failure, traffic overload,
routing protocol failure, network scalability issues, network
topological changes, base station and backbone failures [6].
The target faults in this paper include; node failure, link failure
and traffic congestion.
1) Node Failure: Node failure is a situation when a node is
unresponsive to messages from other nodes. Node failure can
happen in a WMN in different ways. Software failure, hard-
ware defects and batter power drainage can be probable causes
of node failure [6]. Node failure degrades the performance of
the network and results in dropped or corrupt messages and
routing protocol overhead.
2) Link Failure: Link failure happens when wireless links
dictable circumstances, multi-path fading and weak signal [6].
Link failures degrade the performance of the network.
3) Traffic Congestion: Traffic congestion is caused by large
amount of data transmitted over a link simultaneously, high
throughput demand, and limited bandwidth in links. Traffic
congestion causes degradation in link quality and degrade the
performance of the WMN. Furthermore, traffic congestion can
happen as a side effect of other network faults and network
topological changes [6].
B. Artificial Neural Network Architecture
Our proposed fault detection and diagnosis approach for
WMNs is based on multilayer feed-forward ANN shown in
Figure 1. The architecture we use for the ANN for the purpose
of fault detection and diagnosis of WMN is made of three
layers; one input layer, one hidden and one output layer. We
have 5 neurons in the input layer. Each neuron in the input
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Fig. 1. Structure of Artificial Neural Network
layer represent one of the fault symptoms.The output layer is
consisted of three nodes. Each node represents one of the three
faults we consider in this approach. Table I shows the outputs
for normal, individual and composite fault states.
C1 C2 C3 Output States
0 0 0 Normal
1 0 0 Node Failure
0 1 0 Link Failure
0 0 1 Traffic Congestion
1 1 0 Node Failure + Link Failure
1 0 1 Node Failure + Traffic Congestion
0 1 1 Link Failure + Traffic Congestion
1 1 1 Node Failure + Link Failure + Traffic Congestion
TABLE I
L IST OF OUTPUTS AND THEIR ASSOCIATED STATES
C. Training Dataset
We train the network by providing it with the parameters
of normal and faulty situations of the network as the input
vector. The dataset is generated based on the data obtained
from the network operation statistics from the simulation and
is composed of 25200 records. The dataset is consisted of
parameters such as number of dropped packets, delay and
throughput reduction. Normal and faulty data are labeled fed to
the neural network as inputs. In the testing phase input vector
is fed to the neural network without specifying the desired
output values and the neural network distinguishes between
normal and faulty network states and classifies the faults. Since
the input values in the dataset do not have a considerable range
difference, normalization of the data is not needed.
V. P ERFORMANCE A NALYSIS
To obtain the results we have run the simulation 500
times for each fault. In the following chart which shows the
results of our implementation ”N” indicates Node Failure, ”L”
indicates Link Failure, ”T” stands for Traffic Congestion, and
combination of the letters show composite faults.
The performance analysis factors include; Detection rate,
False positive and False negative. Figure 2 shows the detection
rate of the proposed approach for each fault and composite
faults. The accuracy rate is determined by the number of false
positive and false negative occurrences which is also shown
in figure 2 for each fault and composite faults.
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Fig. 2. Detection and Accuracy Rate
VI. C ONCLUSION
In this paper we have proposed an Artificial Neural Network
based fault detection and diagnosis mechanism which uses a
feed-forward neural network and a back-propagation learning
algorithm to train the network. The ANN is trained with a
dataset that is obtained from network event data and statistics.
We have considered node failure, link failure and traffic
congestion as target faults. Our proposed approach performs
well in the situations when the network is in state of composite
faults which the current fault management approaches cannot
address at best. The existing approaches deal with single
type of faults in WMNs whereas our proposed approach is
able to detect individual and composite faults as well as
classifying them. According to our experiments the approach
has more than 97% detection rate for individual faults and
90% for composite faults. The amount of false positive and
false negative detection is insignificant.
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