Reliability Analysis of a Monitoring System for Extraterrestrial Habitats

This paper presents a robust and dependable monitoring system designed for space missions where reliability is critical. Theoretically, we use the Markov chain model to evaluate the availability of the system, considering multiple instances of backup devices. The results indicate a substantial improvement in system availability with the inclusion of backup devices. The findings highlight the significance of redundancy in enhancing system dependability while considering practical constraints. Based on this insight, we design an algorithm to deploy backup devices in the system that would improve the system's availability without putting strain on the resources (e.g., channel congestion). It uses backup devices at the sensor node and gateway levels. The algorithm involves backup devices that actively monitor and take over in case of failures, enhancing the system's ability to recover lost or faulty data. We test the system in three failure scenarios: hard failures, sensor failures, and gateway failures. We perform the experiments on our hardware prototypes. Experimental results demonstrate that using backup devices significantly improves the Packet Reception Ratio (PRR) in failure scenarios. We observed an improvement of 30 - 34% in packet reception for different failure scenarios.