A Phased-Mission Framework for Communication Reliability in WSN

In this paper we study the communication reliability of wireless sensor networks (WSN) under a phased-mission framework. Two types of communication phases in WSN are identified: infrastructure communication phase (ICP) and application communication phase (ACP). A complete WSN communication task usually involves one or more ICP and ACP. The difficulties in the reliability analysis of traditional phased-mission system due to the dynamics in the system configuration and component behavior as well as statistical dependencies across phases for a given component still exist in the communication reliability analysis of WSN. Moreover, the dynamic structure during the ACP brings new challenges to our study. Under the proposed phased-mission framework, we develop binary decision diagram-based evaluation algorithms for K-coverage guaranteed WSN communication reliability. Both bidirectional and unidirectional communication links are considered. The proposed algorithms have no limitation on the type of time-to-failure distributions for the network components. Case studies are given to illustrate the application of the proposed algorithms.