  Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are fundamental to the Internet of Things
(IoT) by bridging the gap between the physical and the cyber worlds. Anomaly
detection is a critical task in this context as it is responsible for
identifying various events of interests such as equipment faults and
undiscovered phenomena. However, this task is challenging because of the
elusive nature of anomalies and the volatility of the ambient environments. In
a resource-scarce setting like WSN, this challenge is further elevated and
weakens the suitability of many existing solutions. In this paper, for the
first time, we introduce autoencoder neural networks into WSN to solve the
anomaly detection problem. We design a two-part algorithm that resides on
sensors and the IoT cloud respectively, such that (i) anomalies can be detected
at sensors in a fully distributed manner without the need for communicating
with any other sensors or the cloud, and (ii) the relatively more
computation-intensive learning task can be handled by the cloud with a much
lower (and configurable) frequency. In addition to the minimal communication
overhead, the computational load on sensors is also very low (of polynomial
complexity) and readily affordable by most COTS sensors. Using a real WSN
indoor testbed and sensor data collected over 4 consecutive months, we
demonstrate via experiments that our proposed autoencoder-based anomaly
detection mechanism achieves high detection accuracy and low false alarm rate.
It is also able to adapt to unforeseeable and new changes in a non-stationary
environment, thanks to the unsupervised learning feature of our chosen
autoencoder neural networks.
