Reliability Modeling of Wireless Sensor Networks: A Review

Abstract

Increasing computing and wireless communication capabilities will expand the role of the sensors from mere information dissemination to more demanding tasks as sensor fusion, classification, collaborative target tracking. Fault tolerance and reliability performs exclusively vital role for embedded systems, such as obscured wireless sensors, which are deployed in some applications where it is difficult to access them physically. This paper is a contributing effort to explore the reliability issues in multifusion sensor networks. We present Markov models of the reliability using different types of sensors and spares that replace sensors when failed. We compare these models in terms of reliability, cost and MTTF (Minimum- Time-To-Fail).