Deep Dual Masked Transformer-Based Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection for Wireless Sensor Network Node Fault Diagnosis

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Author(s)

Sayeekumar Madheswaran 1 Karthik Govindan Manoharan 2,* Syed Shameem 3 M. Arumugam 4 Kasukurthi Rambabu 5 V. Gokula Krishnan 6

1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering – AIML, Global Campus, Jain Deemed-to-be-University, Bengaluru – 562112, Karnataka, India

2. School of Computer Science and Engineering (SCOPE), Vellore Institute of Technology, Katpadi – Thiruvalam Road, Vellore – 632014, Tamil Nadu, India

3. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Koneru Lakshmaiah Education Foundation, Green Fields, Vaddeswaram, Guntur District – 522302, Andhra Pradesh, India

4. Department of Computer Technology–PG, Kongu Engineering College (Autonomous), Perundurai, Erode – 638060, Tamil Nadu, India

5. Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Aditya University, Surampalem – 533437, Andhra Pradesh, India

6. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Easwari Engineering College, Ramapuram, Chennai – 600089, Tamil Nadu, India

* Corresponding author.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5815/ijwmt.2026.05.19

Received: 9 Jul. 2026 / Revised: 7 Aug. 2026 / Accepted: 15 Sep. 2026 / Published: 8 Oct. 2026

Index Terms

Wireless Sensor Networks, Anomaly Detection, Self-Supervised Learning, Fault Diagnosis, Deep Representation Learning, Temporal Data Analysis

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks enable real-time monitoring in critical applications such as industrial automation, environmental sensing, healthcare, and infrastructure management. However, sensor node faults caused by hardware degradation, communication failures, and harsh operating conditions can significantly reduce data reliability and system performance. Existing anomaly detection approaches often depend on large amounts of labelled fault data and suffer from class imbalance, noise sensitivity, computational complexity, and limited generalization in dynamic environments, highlighting the need for adaptive and scalable fault diagnosis frameworks. To address these limitations, this study proposes a self-supervised deep anomaly detection framework for wireless sensor network node fault diagnosis. The proposed method integrates preprocessing and sliding-window segmentation with a Deep Dual Masked Transformer (DDMT) architecture to capture temporal dependencies and learn discriminative features without extensive labelled data. A self-supervised reconstruction objective with a 15% masking strategy is employed to optimize latent representations, while an adaptive anomaly-scoring mechanism generates reliable fault predictions. Experimental results on the Zidi wireless sensor network dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an accuracy of 99.0%, a precision of 98.5%, a recall of 98.3%, an F1-score of 98.4%, and an ROC-AUC of 99.5%, outperforming existing baseline methods. By combining temporal modelling and representation learning within a unified framework, the proposed approach improves anomaly detection accuracy, robustness, scalability, and generalization capability while maintaining low false alarm rates in challenging wireless sensor network environments.

Cite This Paper

Sayeekumar Madheswaran, Karthik Govindan Manoharan, Syed Shameem, M. Arumugam, Kasukurthi Rambabu, V. Gokula Krishnan, "Deep Dual Masked Transformer-Based Self-Supervised Anomaly Detection for Wireless Sensor Network Node Fault Diagnosis", International Journal of Wireless and Microwave Technologies(IJWMT), Vol.16, No.5, pp. 316-329, 2026. DOI:10.5815/ijwmt.2026.05.19

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