Characteristics Analysis and Challenges for Fault Diagnosis in Solar Insecticidal Lamps Internet of Things

Solar insecticidal lamps Internet of Things (SIL-IoTs) is a novel physical agricultural pest control implement, which is an emerging paradigm that extends Internet of Things technology towards Solar Insecticidal Lamp (SIL). SIL-IoTs is composed of SIL nodes with functions of preventing and controlling of agricultural migratory pests with phototaxis feature, which can be deployed over a vast region for the purpose of ensuring pests outbreak area location, reducing pesticide dosage and monitoring agricultural environmental conditions. SIL-IoTs is widely used in agricultural production, and a number of studies have been conducted. However, in most current research projects, fault diagnosis has not been taken into consideration, despite the fact that SIL-IoTs faults have an adverse influence on the development and application of SIL-IoTs. Based on this background, this research aims to analyze the characteristics and challenges of fault diagnosis in SIL-IoTs, which naturally leads to a great number of open research issues outlined afterward. Firstly, an overview and state-of-art of SIL-IoTs were introduced, and the importance of fault diagnosis in SIL-IoTs was analyzed. Secondly, faults of SIL nodes were listed and classified into different types of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) faults. Furthermore, WSNs faults were classified into behavior-based, time-based, component-based, and area affected-based faults. Different types of fault diagnosis algorithms (i.e., statistic method, probability method, hierarchical routing method, machine learning method, topology control method, and mobile sink method) in WSNs were discussed and summarized. Moreover, WSNs fault diagnosis strategies were classified into behavior-based strategies (i.e., active type and positive type), monitoring-based strategies (i.e., continuous type, periodic type, direct type, and indirect type) and facility-based strategies (i.e., centralized type, distributed type and hybrid type). Based on above algorithms and strategies, four kinds of fault phenomena: 1) abnormal background data, 2) abnormal communication of some nodes, 3) abnormal communication of the whole SIL-IoTs, and 4) normal performance with abnormal behavior actually were introduced, and fault diagnosis tools (i.e., Sympathy, Clairvoyant, SNIF and Dustminer) which were adapted to the mentioned fault phenomena were analyzed. Finally, four challenges of fault diagnosis in SIL-IoTs were highlighted, i.e., 1) the complex deployment environment of SIL nodes, leading to the fault diagnosis challenges of heterogeneous WSNs under the condition of unequal energy harvesting, 2) SIL nodes task conflict, resulting from the interference of high voltage discharge, 3) signal loss of continuous area nodes, resulting in the regional link fault, and 4) multiple failure situations of fault diagnosis. To sum up, fault diagnosis plays a vital role in ensuring the reliability, real-time data transmission, and insecticidal efficiency of SIL-IoTs. This work can also be extended for various types of smart agriculture applications and provide fault diagnosis references.