Reliability assessment of wireless sensor network deployments
Dina S. Deif, Yasser M. Gadallah · 2016
Evaluating the reliability of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is of great importance especially for WSNs designed for mission-critical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel reliability metric for WSNs. Unlike existing metrics in the literature, the proposed metric takes into account both aspects of WSN functionality, namely, coverage and connectivity. In addition, it does not assume a specific configuration of the WSN deployment and it is valid for heterogeneous deployments. The proposed metric is based on the practical assumption that Sensor Nodes (SNs) are subject to two distinct types of random failures: sensor failure and transceiver failure. Based on this assumption, SNs are modeled as three-mode (on, relay and off) systems instead of the conventional two-mode (on and off) model adopted in the existing metrics. Results show the significance of using the proposed metric on the accuracy of reliability assessment as compared to an existing metric which uses the two-mode SN model. Results also show that for real-world WSN deployments, which are usually cost-optimized, the lower bound of the proposed metric can be used as a reasonable approximation for the exact value of reliability at only a fraction of its computation cost.