Probabilistic Model for Reliability Analysis in Wireless Sensor Networks

Advancement in wireless sensor networks technology enables a wide range of applications such as health care, industrial automation, ambient conditions monitoring and security and defense systems. WSNs designers are facing many challenges in meeting application requirements e.g. reliability, fault tolerance, lifetime, throughput and responsiveness etc as application requirements and environmental conditions change over time. Failure of WSN may result catastrophic consequences like loss of life in the case of health care application and major disasters in the case of defense systems. This chapter presents a probabilistic model based on Markov modeling for reliability analysis by adding redundancy within a sensor node to replace the faulty sensors in case failure occurs. The basic idea in this chapter is to address and analyze the reliability issues to device a reliable and fault tolerant model for a sensor network system. We analyzed the model in terms of reliability and MTTF (Mean-Time-To-Failure). Rest of the chapter is organized as follows: Section 5.1 presents the introduction followed by the background in Section 5.2. Key issues behind the work have been presented in Section 5.3. In Section 5.4, a brief description of terminology of reliability and fault tolerance has been presented. Analysis of system model has been presented in Section 5.5. Results have been given in Section 5.6 followed by the conclusion in Section 5.7. Finally, chapter has been summarized in Section 5.8.