Communication Reliability Analysis of Wireless Sensor Networks Using Phased-Mission Model

Communication reliability of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is essential to ensure the correct and reliable operation of the network. Two distinct communication paradigms exist in WSNs: infrastructure communication and application communication, and a practical communication task typically involves both types of communications. To the best of our knowledge, no reliability studies on WSNs have been dedicated to combining the two communication paradigms. In this paper, we advance the state-of-the-art by proposing a phased-mission framework to analyze the communication reliability of WSNs considering both infrastructure communication and application communication, as well as K-coverage requirements. WSNs containing two types of sensor nodes (energy harvesting sensor nodes and battery-powered sensor nodes) are modeled. Corresponding to the two types of sensor nodes, two different link reliability models are first presented. Binary decision diagram (BDD) based algorithms are then developed for the phased-mission communication reliability analysis of WSNs. Case studies are given to illustrate the application of the proposed algorithms. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd