A network state based reliability evaluation model for WSNs

Reliability is an important research issue in wireless sensor networks(WSNs). Many literatures about how to improve network reliability in WSNs have been proposed, however the research on establishing evaluation models of reliability for WSNs is yet insufficient. In this paper, a model to evaluate the reliability of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is proposed. This network state based model can effectively evaluate the probability of successful transmission of data packets in WSNs with the consideration of the work states of both the sensor node's different modules and the quality of the communication link. We evaluated the reliability of WSNs in single task and multi-task mode. At the same time, how different network topologies, such as flat and clustering structures, affect the reliability of WSNs is also discussed respectively. Furthermore, some typical reliable strategies, such as retransmission, multi-path transmission and multiple sink nodes, are analyzed and evaluated. The simulation attempts to evaluate the reliability of WSNs quantitatively and the results have shown the impacts of network state on reliability and the effectiveness in different reliable mechanisms.