Abstract
This paper presents a failure diagnosis algorithm for summarizing and generalizing patterns that lead to instances of anomalous behavior in sensor networks. Often multiple seemingly different event patterns lead to the same type of failure manifestation. A hidden relationship exists, in those patterns, among event attributes that is somehow responsible for the failure. For example, in some system, a message might always get corrupted if the sender is more than two hops away from the receiver (which is a distance relationship) irrespective of the senderId and receiverId. To uncover such failure-causing relationships, we present a new symbolic pattern extraction technique that identifies and symbolically expresses relationships correlated with anomalous behavior. Symbolic pattern extraction is a new concept in sensor network debugging that is unique in its ability to generalize over patterns that involve different combinations of nodes or message exchanges by extracting their common relationship. As a proof of concept, we provide synthetic traffic scenarios where we show that applying symbolic pattern extraction can uncover more complex bug patterns that are crucial to the understanding of real causes of problems. We also use symbolic pattern extraction to diagnose a real bug and show that it generates much fewer and more accurate patterns compared to previous approaches.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Agrawal, R., Srikant, R.: Fast algorithms for mining association rules. In: Proceedings of the Twentieth International Conference on Very Large Data Bases (VLDB 1994), pp. 487–499 (1994)
Aguilera, M.K., Mogul, J.C., Wiener, J.L., Reynolds, P., Muthitacharoen, A.: Performance debugging for distributed systems of black boxes. In: Proceedings of the nineteenth ACM symposium on Operating systems principles (SOSP 2003), Bolton Landing, NY, USA, pp. 74–89 (2003)
Bodík, P., Friedman, G., Biewald, L., Levine, H., Candea, G., Patel, K., Tolle, G., Hui, J., Fox, A., Jordan, M.I., Patterson, D.: Combining visualization and statistical analysis to improve operator confidence and efficiency for failure detection and localization. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Autonomic Computing (ICAC 2005) (2005)
Cao, Q., Abdelzaher, T., Stankovic, J., Whitehouse, K., Luo, L.: Declarative tracepoints: A programmable and application independent debugging system for wireless sensor networks. In: Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), Raleigh, NC, USA (2008)
Ertin, E., Arora, A., Ramnath, R., Nesterenko, M.: Kansei: A testbed for sensing at scale. In: Proceedings of the 4th Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN/SPOTS track) (2006)
Fatta, G.D., Leue, S., Stegantova, E.: Discriminative pattern mining in software fault detection. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on Software quality assurance (SOQUA 2006), pp. 62–69 (2006)
Girod, L., Elson, J., Cerpa, A., Stathopoulos, T., Ramanathan, N., Estrin, D.: Emstar: a software environment for developing and deploying wireless sensor networks. In: Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATEC 2004), Boston, MA, p. 24 (2004)
Khan, M.M.H., Abdelzaher, T., Gupta, K.K.: Towards diagnostic simulation in sensor networks. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems (DCOSS), Greece (2008)
Khan, M.M.H., Le, H.K., Ahmadi, H., Abdelzaher, T.F., Han, J.: Dustminer: Troubleshooting interactive complexity bugs in sensor networks. In: Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), Raleigh, NC, USA (2008)
Khan, M.M.H., Luo, L., Huang, C., Abdelzaher, T.: Snts: Sensor network troubleshooting suite. In: Aspnes, J., Scheideler, C., Arora, A., Madden, S. (eds.) DCOSS 2007. LNCS, vol. 4549, pp. 142–157. Springer, Heidelberg (2007)
Levis, P., Lee, N., Welsh, M., Culler, D.: Tossim: accurate and scalable simulation of entire tinyos applications. In: Proceedings of the 1st international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems (SenSys 2003), Los Angeles, California, USA, pp. 126–137 (2003)
Liu, C., Fei, L., Yan, X., Han, J., Midkiff, S.P.: Statistical debugging: A hypothesis testing-based approach. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Liu, C., Lian, Z., Han, J.: How bayesians debug. In: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM 2006) (December 2006)
Liu, C., Yan, X., Fei, L., Han, J., Midkiff, S.P.: Sober: statistical model-based bug localization. In: Proceedings of the 13th ACM SIGSOFT international symposium on Foundations of software engineering (FSE 13), Lisbon, Portugal (2005)
Liu, C., Yan, X., Han, J.: Mining control flow abnormality for logic error isolation. In: Proceedings of 2006 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2006), Bethesda, MD (April 2006)
Liu, K., Li, M., Liu, Y., Li, M., Guo, Z., Hong, F.: Pad: Passive diagnosis for wireless sensor networks. In: Proceedings of the 6th ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems (SenSys), Raleigh, NC, USA (2008)
Polley, J., Blazakis, D., McGee, J., Rusk, D., Baras, J.S.: Atemu: A fine-grained sensor network simulator. In: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks (SECON 2004), pp. 145–152, Santa Clara, CA (October 2004)
Ramanathan, N., Chang, K., Kapur, R., Girod, L., Kohler, E., Estrin, D.: Sympathy for the sensor network debugger. In: Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems (SenSys 2005) (2005)
Szewczyk, R., Polastre, J., Mainwaring, A., Culler, D.: Lessons from a sensor network expedition. In: Karl, H., Wolisz, A., Willig, A. (eds.) EWSN 2004. LNCS, vol. 2920, pp. 307–322. Springer, Heidelberg (2004)
Tolle, G., Culler, D.: Design of an application-cooperative management system for wireless sensor networks. In: Proceedings of the Second European Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks (EWSN 2005), Turkey, February 2005, pp. 121–132 (2005)
Wen, Y., Wolski, R., Moore, G.: Disens: scalable distributed sensor network simulation. In: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Principles and practice of parallel programming (PPoPP 2007), San Jose, California, USA, pp. 24–34 (2007)
Werner-Allen, G., Swieskowski, P., Welsh, M.: Motelab: A wireless sensor network testbed. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN 2005), Special Track on Platform Tools and Design Methods for Network Embedded Sensors (SPOTS) (April 2005)
Whitehouse, K., Tolle, G., Taneja, J., Sharp, C., Kim, S., Jeong, J., Hui, J., Dutta, P., Culler, D.: Marionette: Using rpc for interactive development and debugging of wireless embedded networks. In: Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks: Special Track on Sensor Platform, Tools, and Design Methods for Network Embedded Systems (IPSN/SPOTS), Nashville, TN, pp. 416–423 (April 2006)
Yang, J., Soffa, M.L., Selavo, L., Whitehouse, K.: Clairvoyant: a comprehensive source-level debugger for wireless sensor networks. In: Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Embedded networked sensor systems (SenSys 2007), pp. 189–203 (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Khan, M.M.H., Abdelzaher, T., Han, J., Ahmadi, H. (2009). Finding Symbolic Bug Patterns in Sensor Networks. In: Krishnamachari, B., Suri, S., Heinzelman, W., Mitra, U. (eds) Distributed Computing in Sensor Systems. DCOSS 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5516. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02085-8_10
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02085-8_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-02084-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-02085-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)