Breach Path Reliability for Directional Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) equipped with directional communication and sensing devices provide a high level of tunability needed in optimizing their performance in critical applications. Such devices and nodes, however, remain prone to failure when operating in the field. In this paper we formalize a problem, called directional breach path detection reliability (DIR-BPDREL), that quantifies the ability of such networks to jointly detect and report unauthorized traversal through a network when communication and sensing devices fail independently of each other. We adopt a framework for deriving lower and upper bounds on exact reliability solutions, and develop efficient algorithms for optimizing the computations using pathset and cutset structures of the given network. The algorithms process separate communication and sensing graphs to ensure joint detection and reporting of intrusion events from multiple possible entry-exit sides. The obtained numerical results give insight into the effect of various design parameters on network wide performance.