The Role of Field Data for Analyzing the Dependability of Short Range Wireless Technologies

The migration from mobile to ubiquitous Internet is at hand, due to the intense growth of short range wireless technologies. Users accessing the Internet through wireless devices are increasing, if compared to “wired” ones, and they expect the same dependability level they already experience on wired networks, that is high quality “always on” wireless networks. But how can we analyze the dependability level of a wireless network? Direct analysis of failures from the field of application is an effective practice to understand the actual dependability behavior of an operational system. However, despite its wide use over the last four decades on a large variety of systems, field data analysis has rarely been applied to wireless networks. Through the experience gained from extensive failure analysis of Bluetooth networks, the article shows how field failure data can play a key role to fill the gap on understanding the dependability behavior of wireless networks.