A Quantitative Measure of Reliability for Wireless Sensor Networks

The reliability of a wireless sensor network is often associated with its capacity to maintain an end-to-end connection in the presence of unreliable links or node failure. It is also associated with the level of partitioning the network suffers when some nodes fail or exhaust their batteries. Despite being a critical feature, often it is not clear how it can be expressed in quantifiable terms. We assert that Katz's status index can be used as an adequate measure of reliability. Originally proposed for sociometric analysis, it assigns a value of significance to each node in a network. Some of the underlying assumptions made and the intermediate steps taken to construct the status index are not applicable for our case, but we shall demonstrate that their effect on the final result is marginal.