Probabilistic competing failure analysis in multi-state wireless sensor networks
Yujie Wang, Liudong Xing, Lavanya Mandava · 2018
This paper identifies and models competitions between probabilistic isolation effect and failure propagation effect in reliability analysis of relay-assisted wireless sensor networks subject to multiple performance levels. Particularly failure competitions exist in the time domain between propagated failures of sensors (e.g., caused by jamming attacks) and local failure (e.g., transmission malfunction) of a relay node that transits sensed information between the sensors and the sink device. Different failure sequences can lead to dramatically different WSN statuses. A combinatorial method is proposed for addressing such a challenging reliability problem for multi-state WSNs, which is applicable to arbitrary state distributions of the WSN components. The method is illustrated through detailed analysis of an example multi-state WSN for monitoring air quality of a critical room.