The focus of this research was to design a framework to create highly autonomous fault-tolerant distributed sensor networks with plug-and-play capabilities. This would enable diagnosis of faulty sensors and reconfiguration of the network in real time to ensure that the control of the manufacturing process can continue with accurate information in presence of sensor and processing element faults. The strategy is based on the recently approved IEEE 1451 family of standards. The innovative feature of the proposed effort is the IEEE 1451-based plug-and-play architecture that could lead to the development of a new member in the IEEE 1451 family of standards that will address reliability issues of the sensor networks.