New Index for Wireless Sensor Network Reliability Analysis

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are widely used for monitoring various objects: an area, a border, a building, etc. We consider WSNs with perfectly reliable links and unreliable sensors. It is assumed that the WSN contains initially excessive amount of nodes, so it can carry on work acceptably even if some sensors fail. For such networks, new reliability measure is introduced - the probability that sink nodes can collect data from other nodes that amount exceeds a specified threshold limit. The problem of calculation of the new network reliability measure is NP-hard, as well as the problem of calculating the classical network reliability measure - k-terminal network reliability. We propose a method for new reliability measure calculation and a method for cumulative updating of upper and lower reliability bounds.