Minimal Path-Based Reliability Model for Wireless Sensor Networks With Multistate Nodes

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) find application in various fields like environmental monitoring, health-care, land security, and many more. To ease our day-to-day activity, WSNs have become an integral tool for complex data gathering tasks. Monitoring a phenomenon by a WSN depends on the collective data provided by the sensor nodes. To ensure reliable operation of WSNs, it is important to quantify the performance of such networks in terms of network reliability measures. This article studies the reliability of WSNs with multistate nodes and proposes an approach to evaluate the flow-oriented network reliability of WSNs consisting of multistate sensor nodes. The proposed method takes into account the dynamic state of the network due to multistate sensor nodes. The proposed approach includes enumeration of shortest minimal paths from application-specific flow satisfying sensor nodes (source nodes) to the sink node. It then proposes a modified sum-of-disjoint products approach to evaluate WSN reliability in the presence of multistate nodes from the enumerated shortest minimal paths. Simulations are performed on WSNs of various sizes to show the applicability of the proposed approach on arbitrary WSNs.