On the Reliability of Wireless Sensor Networks Communications

More and more Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applications and protocols are proposed. Notably, critical applications, which must meet time and reliability requirements. Works on the real-time capability of WSNs have been proposed [1]. In this paper we propose to study the achievable reliability of WSNs, tacking into account the probabilistic nature of the radio link. We define the reliability of a WSN to be the probability that an end-to-end communication is successful (i.e. the packet is received by the sink). We propose a theoretical framework inspired by a reference model [5]. We use the framework to derive the reliability of two types of routing schemes: unicast-based and broadcastbased. We show that in the case of broadcast-based, the sink is a reliability bottleneck of the network. We also discuss the impact of the MAC scheme on the reliability.