Reliability modeling of relay-assisted wireless body area networks

This paper considers correlated, probabilistic competing failures in the reliability analysis of relay-assisted wireless body area networks (WBANs). Particularly failure competitions exist in the time domain between propagated failures of biosensors caused by jamming attacks and local failures (e.g., transmission unit failure) of relay nodes that transit physiological information between biosensors and the sink device. In addition, a biosensor can deliver its sensed information to the sink device through multiple relays and a relay can be shared by multiple biosensors, which creates correlations among WBAN components making the probabilistic competing failure analysis even more challenging. A combinatorial and analytical method is proposed for addressing such a challenging reliability problem for the relay-assisted WBAN. The method is illustrated through detailed analysis of an example WBAN system from healthcare domain.