Dependability analysis of wireless sensor networks with active-sleep cycles and redundant nodes
Dario Bruneo, Antonio Puliafito, Marco Lucio Scarpa · 2010
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are constituted of a large number of tiny sensor nodes randomly distributed over a geographical region. In order to reduce power consumption, battery-operated sensors undergo cycles of sleeping - active periods that reduce their ability to send/receive data. Starting from the Markov reward model theory, in this paper we present a dependability model to analyze the reliability of a sensor node. We also introduce a new dependability parameter, referred to as producibility, able to capture the capability of a sensor to accomplish its mission. Two different model solution techniques are proposed, one based on the evaluation of the accumulated reward distribution and the other based on an equivalent model based on non-Markovian Stochastic Petri nets. The obtained results are used to investigate the dependability of a whole WSN taking into account the presence of redundant nodes. Preliminary results are provided in order to highlight the advantages of the proposed technique.