Design of reliable wireless sensor network (WSN) needs to address the failure of single or multiple network components and implementation of the techniques to tolerate the faults occurred at various levels. The issues and requirements of reliability improvement mechanism depend on the available resources and application for which the WSN is deployed. This paper discusses the different modeling approaches to evaluate the reliability and classification of the approaches to improve it. Also the paper analyze s reliability enhancement by existing fault tolerant methods in WSN and compare s the performance of these techniques with the technique we developed. From the results of the analysis we highlight the challenges and the characteristics of the sensor network affects the reliability and give some scope of future research directions in order to enhance reliability.
KeywordsComponent Reliability ModelingReliability MeasureReliability RequirementsFault ToleranceQuality of Information
I. F. Akyildiz, W. Su, Y. Sankarasubramaniam and E. Cayirci, “Wireless Sensor Network: A Survey,” IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 40, No. 8, 2002, pp. 102-114. doi:10.1109/MCOM.2002.1024422
J. Agre and L. Clare, “An Integrated Architecture for Cooperative Sensing Networks,” IEEE Journal Computer, Vol. 33, No. 5, 2000, pp. 106-108. doi:10.1109/2.841788
J. A. Stankovic, “Wireless Sensor Networks,” IEEE Computer, Vol. 41, No. 10, 2008, pp. 92-95. doi:10.1109/MC.2008.441
R. Kim, J. Song and B. F. Spencer, Jr., “Reliability Analysis of Wireless Sensor Networks,” Proceedings of the Workshop on Advanced Smart Materials and Smart Structures Technology, Dalian, July 2011, pp. 1-12.
D. Bein, V. Jolly, B. Kumar and S. Latifi, “Reliability Modeling in Wireless Sensor Networks,” International Journal of Information Technology, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2005, pp. 1-9.
H. Liu, A. Nayak and I. Stojmenovic, “Fault Tolerant Algorithms/Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks” In: S. C. Misra, I. Woungang and S. Misra, Eds., Guide to Wireless Sensor Networks, Springer Veglag, London, 2009, pp. 261-291. doi:10.1007/978-1-84882-218-4_10
W. Yuan, S. V. Krishnamurthy and S. K. Tripathi, “Improving the Reliability of Event Reports in Wireless Sensor Networks,” Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Computers and Communications, Vol. 1, 2004, pp. 220-225.
Z. Rosberg, R. P. Liu, T. L. D. Yi, F. Dong and S. Jha, “Statistical Reliability for Energy Efficient Data Transport in Wireless Sensor Networks,” Springer Journal Wireless Networks, Vol. 16, No. 7, 2010, pp. 1913-1927. doi:10.1007/s11276-009-0235-5
A. Ayadi, “Energy-Efficient and Reliable Transport Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks: State-of-Art,” Journal Wireless Sensor Network, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2011, pp. 106-113. doi:10.4236/wsn.2011.33011
S.-J. Park, R. Vedantham, R. Sivakumar and I. F. Akyildiz, “GARUDA: Achieving Effective Reliability for Downstream Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks,” IEEE Transactions On Mobile Computing, Vol. 7, No. 2, 2008, pp. 214-230. doi:10.1109/TMC.2007.70707
J. Paek and R. Govindan, “RCRT: Rate-Controlled Reliable Transport for Wireless Sensor Networks,” ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2010, pp. 305-317. doi:10.1145/1807048.1807049
T.-W. Sung, T.-T. Wu, C.-S. Yang and Y.-M. Huang, “Reliable Data Broadcast for Zigbee Wireless Sensor Networks,” International Journal On Smart Sensing And Intelligent Systems, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2010, pp. 504-520.
A. G. Bagadi, S. Sarode and J. W. Bakal, “A Survey of Reliable Transport Layer Protocols for Wireless Sensor Network,” International Journal of Computer Applications, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2011, pp. 44-50.
K. K. Sharma, R. B. Patel and H. Singh, “A Reliable and Energy Efficient Transport Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks,” International Journal of Computer Networks & Communications, Vol. 2, No. 5, 2010, pp. 92-103. doi:10.5121/ijcnc.2010.2506
J. J. Winston and B. Paramasivan, “A Survey on Connectivity Maintenance and Preserving Coverage for Wireless Sensor Networks,” International Journal of Research and Reviews in Wireless Sensor Networks, 2011, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 11-18.
Z. ShuKui, G. ShengRong, C. ZhiMing and F. J. Xi , “A Reliable Collaborative Detection Scheme of Event-Region in Wireless Sensor Networks,” Proceedings of the International Symposium on Information Processing, 2009, pp. 021-024.
G. J. Fan and S. Y. Jin, “Coverage Problem in Wireless Sensor Network: A Survey,” Journal of Networks, Vol. 5, No. 9, 2010, pp. 1033-1040.
G. Campobello, A. Leonardi and S. Pa-lazzo, “Improving Energy Saving and Reliability in Wireless Sensor Networks Using a Simple CRT-Based Packet-Forwarding Solution,” EEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2012, pp. 191-205.
E. Canete, M. Díaz, L. Llopis and B. Rubio, “HERO: A Hierarchical, Efficient and Reliable Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks,” Computer Communications Vol. 35, No. 11, 2012, pp. 1392-1409. doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2012.04.003
R. V. Kshirsagar and B. Jirapure, “A Survey on Fault Detection and Fault Tolerance in Wireless Sensor Networks,” International Journal of Computer Applications, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2011, pp. 130-138.
S. Mishra, L. Jena and A. Pradhan, “Fault Tolerance in Wireless Sensor Networks,” International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Science and Software Engineering, Vol. 2, No. 10, 2012, pp. 146-153.
L. Paradis and Q. Han, “A Survey of Fault Management in Wireless Sensor Networks,” Journal of Network and Systems Management, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2007, pp. 171-190. doi:10.1007/s10922-007-9062-0
F. Koushanfar, M. Potkonjak, A. Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, “Fault Tolerance Techniques for Wireless Ad Hoc Sensor Networks,” Proceedings of the IEEE Conference Sensors, Vol. 2, 2002, pp. 1491-1496. doi:10.1109/ICSENS.2002.1037343
H. Sethi, D. Prasad and R. B. Patel, “EIRDA: An Energy Efficient Interest based Reliable Data Aggregation Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks,” International Journal of Computer Applications, Vol. 22, No. 7, 2011, pp. 20-25.
X. Chen, “On Fault Tolerance, Performance, and Reliability for Wireless and Sensor Networks,” Ph.D. Thesis, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 2005.
E. Felemban, C.-G. Lee and E. Ekici, “MMSPEED: Multi-path Multi-SPEED Protocol for QoS Guarantee of Reliability and Timeliness in Wireless Sensor Networks,” IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, Vol. 5, No. 6, 2006, pp. 738-754.
Y.-L. Jin, H.-J. Lin, Z.-M. Zhang, Z. Zhang and X.-Y. Zhang, “Estimating the Reliability and Lifetime of Wireless Sensor Network,” Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Wireless Communications, Networking and Mobile Computing, October 2008, pp. 1-4.
B. L. Braem, B. Blondia, C. Moerman and I. Demeester, “Improving Reliability in Multi-Hop Body Sensor Networks,” Second International Conference on Sensor Technologies and Applications, August 2008, pp. 342-347.
J. Shin, U. Ramachandran and M. Ammar, “On Improving the Reliability of Packet Delivery in Dense Wireless Sensor Networks,” Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, August 2007, pp. 718-723.
H. M. F. AboElFotoh, S. S. Iyengar and K. Chakrabarty, “Computing Reliability and Message Delay for Cooperative Wireless Distributed Sensor Networks Subject to Random Failures,” IEEE Transactions on Reliability, Vol. 54, No. 1, 2005, pp. 145-156. doi:10.1109/TR.2004.842540
N. V. Doohan, D. K. Mishra and S. Tokekar, “Reliability Analysis for Wireless Sensor Networks Considering Environmental Parameters Using MATLAB,” Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on CICSN, 2011, pp. 99-102.
S. Kumar, Z. Feng, F. Hu and Y. Xiao, “E2SRT: Enhanced Event-to-Sink Reliable Transport for Wireless Sensor Networks,” Journal of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, Vol. 9, No. 10, 2009, pp. 1301-1311. doi:10.1002/wcm.705
F. K. Shaikh, A. Khelil and N. Suri, “On Modeling the Reliability of Data Transport in Wireless Sensor Networks,” Proceedings of 15th EU-ROMICRO International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing, Feburary 2007, pp. 395-402.
D. S. Kim, R. Ghosh and K. S. Trivedi, “A Hierarchical Model for Reliability Analysis of Sensor Networks,” Proceedings of the 16th IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing, December 2010, pp. 247-248.
I. Silva, L. A. Guedes, P. Portugal and F. Vasques, “Reliability and Availability Evaluation of Wireless Sensor Networks for Industrial Applications,” Sensors, Vol. 12, No. 1, 2012, pp. 806-838. doi:10.3390/s120100806
L. Xing and H. E. Michel, “Integrated Modeling for Wireless Sensor Networks Reliability and Security,” Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Reliability and Maintainability Symposium, January 2006, pp. 594-600.
Y.-F. Xiao, S.-Z. Chen, X. Li and Y.-H. Li, “Reliability Evaluation of Wireless Sensor Networks Using an Enhanced OBDD Algorithm,” Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Communications, 2009, pp. 453-457.
W. W. Bein, D. Bein and S. Malladi, “Reliability and Fault Tolerance of Coverage Models for Sensor Networks,” International Journal of Sensor Networks, Vol. 5, No. 4, 2009, pp. 199-209. doi:10.1504/IJSNET.2009.027628
V. Kumar, R. B. Patel, M. Singh and R. Vaid, “Reliability Analysis in Wireless Sensor Networks,” International Journal of Engineering and Technology, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2011, pp. 74-79.
A. Munir and A. Gordon-Ross, “Markov Modeling of Fault-Tolerant Wireless Sensor Networks,” Proceedings of 20th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks, August 2011, pp. 1-6.
H. Luo, H. Tao, H. Ma and S. K. Das, “Data Fusion with Desired Reliability in Wireless Sensor Networks,” IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2011, pp. 501-512. doi:10.1109/TPDS.2010.93
V. Latha, C. Subramaniam and S. Shanmugavel, “Fault Tolerant Wireless Sensor Network Using Case Based Reasoning with Semantic Tracking,” Proceedings of the WSEAS International Conference on Communications, July 2011, pp. 240-246.
M. A. Mahmood and W. K. G. Seah, “Event Reliability in Wireless Sensor Networks,” Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing, 2011, pp. 377-382.
K. El-Darymli, F. Khan and M. H. Ahmed, “Reliability Modeling of Wireless Sensor Network for Oil and Gas Pipelines Monitoring,” Sensors & Transducers Journal, Vol. 106, No. 7, 2009, pp. 16-26.
E. G. Rowe and T. A. Wettergren, “Coverage and Reliability of Randomly Distributed Sensor Systems with Heterogeneous Detection Range,” International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, Vol. 5, No. 4, 2009, pp. 303-320. doi:10.1080/15501320802299853
A. Taherkordi, M. A. Taleghan and M. Sharifi, “Achieving Availability and Reliability in Wireless Sensor Networks Applications,” Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, 2006, pp. 529-535. doi:10.1109/ARES.2006.21
A. Zaidi, B. O. Bouamama and M. Tagina, “Bayesian Reliability Models of Weibull Systems: State of Art,” International Journal of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Vol. 22, No. 3, 2012, pp. 585-600.
P. S. Patheja, A. Waoo and P. Shrivastava, “Fault Tolerant, Energy Saving Method for Reliable Information Propagation in Sensor Network,” International Journal of Smart Sensors and Ad Hoc Networks, Vol. 1, No. 4, 2012, pp. 34-38.
L. Venkatesan, C. Subramaniam and S. Shanmugavel, “Reliability Modeling of Context Aware Wireless Sensor Network,” International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering, Vol. 2, No. 5, 2012, pp. 710-715.
S. Kim and R. Fonseca, “Reliable Transfer on Wireless Sensor Networks,” Proceedings of the 1st Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks, October 2004, pp. 449-459.
Z. S. Bojkovic, B. M. Bakmaz and M. R. Bakmaz, “Security Issues in Wireless Sensor Networks,” International Journal of Communications, Vol. 2, No. 1, 2008, pp 106-115.
H. C. Chaudhari and L. U. Kadam, “Wireless Sensor Networks: Security, Attacks and Challenges,” International Journal of Networking, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2011, pp. 04-16.
T.-G. Li, C.-C. Hsu and C.-F. Chou, “On Reliable Transmission by Adaptive Network Coding in Wireless Sensor Networks,” Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Communications, June 2009, pp. 1-5.
H. Kwon, T. H. Kim and S. Choi, “A Cross-Layer Strategy for Energy-Efficient Reliable Delivery in Wireless Sensor Networks,” IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Vol. 5, No. 12, 2006, pp. 1-11. doi:10.1109/TWC.2006.256992
S. Saqaeeyan and M. Roshanzadeh, “Improved Multi-Path and Multi-Speed Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks,” International Journal of Computer Network and Information Security, Vol. 4, No. 2, 2012, pp. 8-14. doi:10.5815/ijcnis.2012.02.02
T. Ryutov and C. Neuman, “Trust based Approach for Improving Data Reliability in Industrial Sensor Networks,” ftp://ftp.isi.edu/isi-pubs/tr-631.pdf
K. Maraiya, K. Kant and N. Gupta, “Efficient Cluster Head Selection Scheme for Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Network,” International Journal of Computer Applications, Vol. 23, No. 9, 2011, pp. 10-18.