Approaches of Wireless Sensor Network dependability assessment

The extensive use of the Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in main critical scenarios stresses the need to verify their dependability properties at design time to prevent wrong design choices and at runtime in order to make a WSN more robust against failures that may occur during its operation. In literature, several approaches have been proposed in order to evaluate the dependability of a WSN during its inception and its operating. In this paper we present a survey on these adopted techniques reporting aspects and characteristics of some research studies. Moreover, by means of a comparison grid, we analyze the current state-of-the-art of the approaches of WSN dependability assessment in order to identify the most performant and to discuss the ongoing challenges.