Redundancy Level Impact of the Mean Time to Failure on Wireless Sensor Network

Recently, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have gained a great attention due to their ability to monitor various environments, such as temperature, pressure sound, etc. They are constructed from a large number of sensor nodes with computation and communication abilities. Most probably, sensors are deployed in an uncontrolled environment and hence their failures are inevitable all times of work. Faulty sensor nodes may cause incorrect sensing data, wrong data computation or even incorrect communication. Achieving a reliable wireless sensor networks is a most needed goal to ensure quality of service whether at deployment time or during normal operation. While Nodes redundancy is considered as an effective solution to overcome nodes failures, it may negatively affect the WSN lifetime. Redundancy may lead to more energy drains of the whole system. In this paper, the impact of redundancy level on the Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) of a clustered based wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is investigated. An expression that can be used to determine the most suitable redundancy level that maximizes the network MTTF is derived and evaluated. Keywords—Wireless sensor network; reliability; clustering; fault tolerant; Mean Time to Failure (MTTF)