RelSen: An Optimization-based Framework for Simultaneously Sensor Reliability Monitoring and Data Cleaning

Abstract: Recent advances in the Internet of Things (IoT) technology have led to a surge on the popularity of sensing applications. As a result, people increasingly rely on information obtained from sensors to make decisions in their daily life. Unfortunately, in most sensing applications, sensors are known to be error-prone and their measurements can become misleading at any unexpected time. Therefore, in order to enhance the reliability of sensing applications, apart from the physical phenomena/processes of interest, we believe it is also highly important to monitor the reliability of sensors and clean the sensor data before analysis on them being conducted. Existing studies often regard sensor reliability monitoring and sensor data cleaning as separate problems. In this work, we propose RelSen, a novel optimization-based framework to address the two problems simultaneously via utilizing the mutual dependence between them. Furthermore, RelSen is not application-specific as its implementation assumes a minimal prior knowledge of the process dynamics under monitoring. This significantly improves its generality and applicability in practice. In our experiments, we apply RelSen on an outdoor air pollution monitoring system and a condition monitoring system for a cement rotary kiln. Experimental results show that our framework can timely identify unreliable sensors and remove sensor measurement errors caused by three types of most commonly observed sensor faults.