Reliable surveillance in ring deployed Wireless Sensor Networks

A common configuration used in area surveillance occurs when an area of interest is protected by deploying a number of concentric rings of sensor nodes around the area. When operating in a harsh environment, the nodes of the deployed Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) become subject to random failure. Consequently, the network becomes vulnerable to undetected unauthorized traversals to the area of interest. In this paper, we formulate a network wide reliability problem that quantifies the likelihood that the network continues to provide joint intrusion detection and reporting to a sink node at the center of the network. The algorithm uses a dynamic programming approach that strives to process many of the operating states of network while running efficiently. Our obtained numerical results illustrates the use of the algorithm as a network design tool.