Reliability Computation for Multipath Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks

The evaluation on the transmission reliability is important for the design and optimization of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, an approach, which is aimed at the high reliability oriented multi-path transmission in WSN, is proposed to compute and analyze both transmission reliability and average message delay. In this method, the multiple paths between the source and the sink are mapped into an acyclic directed graph with multi-state elements, in order that the solution can be obtained in the way of recursion by applying a universal generating function method. In the paper, the detailed process for computation and the analysis method are listed, and then the time complexity for the algorithm as well as an example is illustrated.