Reliability of wireless sensor networks subject to phase-dependent probabilistic competing failures

• Published in: 2017 Second International Conference on Reliability Systems Engineering (ICRSE) pp. 1 - 9
• Main Authors: Yujie Wang, Liudong Xing
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.07.2017
• Subjects: failure propagation; multi-valued decision diagram; Phase frequency detector; phase mission; probabilistic competing failure; probabilistic isolation effect; Probabilistic logic; Relays; Reliability engineering; Sensors; wireless sensor network; Wireless sensor networks
• DOI: 10.1109/ICRSE.2017.8030753

This paper considers phase-dependent probabilistic failure competitions in reliability analysis of wireless sensor network (WSN) applications. Particularly, a WSN can experience probabilistic functional dependence (PFD) behavior where operations of some sensors (referred to as probabilistic-dependent components) rely on functions of relay nodes (referred to as trigger components) with certain probabilities. Failure competitions exist in the time-domain between the local failure (e.g., transmission unit failure) of a relay node and propagated failures of its dependent sensors (e.g., jamming attacks), causing distinct system statuses. Further, a WSN may be subject to phased-mission requirements, incurring dynamics in system configuration and component failure behavior, as well as statistical dependencies across phases for a given component, which makes the reliability analysis more challenging. This paper models effects of phase-dependent probabilistic competing failures, and suggests a multi-valued decision diagram (MDD) based combinatorial procedure for reliability analysis of non-repairable WSN systems. The proposed method is applicable to arbitrary types of time-to-failure distributions for WSN components and probabilistic isolation factors. A case study of a WSN system for lab condition monitoring is presented to illustrate application and advantages of the proposed method.