Fault Tolerance and Reliability Issues of Wireless Sensor Networks Based on Markov Models

In this paper, we focus on wireless sensor networks as fault tolerant and reliable systems. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have attracted many concerns in different domains because of their advantages and special features in size, communication, memory, energy consumption, computational ability and deploying at various site locations. Regardless of many considerations like lifetime and connectivity, two fundamental issues in the design of wireless sensor networks are the reliability as being operational and the fault tolerance as an issue in area must be covered by (faulty and operational) sensors. Three fault tolerant models (triangle, square and diamond) are considered. Each model can handle one sensor failure in its configuration without any loss in desired coverage area. We compared these models in terms of reliability and performability. Based on the acquired results, the diamond model has the best reliability and performability function in most of the times