Modeling and Evaluating the Reliability of Wireless Sensor Networks

The reliability of wireless sensor networks (WSN) depends on both network connectivity and sensing coverage. Common-cause failures (CCF) can contribute significantly to the WSN unreliability. This paper considers the problem of modeling and evaluating the coverage-oriented reliability of WSN subject to CCF. Our approach is computationally efficient due to the use of a progressive reduction scheme, reduced ordered binary decision diagrams, as well as a decomposition and aggregation scheme for considering CCF. A hierarchical clustered WSN is used as an example to illustrate the basics and advantages of our approach