Redundancy versus lifetime tradeoff analysis for environment monitoring using wireless sensor networks

Recent advancements of microelectronics and network protocol research enable the vast applications of wireless sensor network in industry and home environments. For example, the research in this paper is part of a NASA hydrogen detection to provide early detection of hydrogen leaks in storage facilities and transportation processes. Reliability issues play a vital role to ensure the quality of service of these applications, as well as to maintain the detection and response capabilities. In this paper, we provide a reliability analysis of a wireless sensor network based on the MIL-HDBK-217 reliability prediction model, and we examine the tradeoffs of enhancing the reliability of the network through redundancy of sensor network sleep sets, versus maximizing the energy-based lifetime of the network. An optimal number of sleep sets can be found, based on the given functional failure and the battery power expense models.