A novel control strategy for fail-safe cyclic data exchange in wireless sensor networks

In this work we propose a fail-safe control strategy to achieve a target network reliability by estimating the lifetime of nodes in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). In the proposed scheme, a network coordinator estimates the outage probability of small-scale uncorrelated fading channel uses and regulates the transmit power of each node in the network in order to simultaneously guarantee the outage probability of each sensor and the overall network availability within predefined limits. The proposed control strategy attains the maximum possible lifetime of the key nodes, and makes readily available a set of results that allows to achieve the proposed targets either by finely tuning the transmit power, the message transmission rate and relevant parameter estimation accuracy, or by reconfiguring the network topology in a timely manner when the key nodes' lifetime falls below a predefined minimum acceptable limit.