Energy control in dependable wireless sensor networks: a modelling perspective

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are composed of a large number of tiny sensor nodes randomly distributed over a geographical region. In order to reduce power consumption, battery-operated sensors undergo cycles of sleeping–active periods that reduce their ability to send/receive data. Starting from the Markov reward model theory, this paper presents a dependability model to analyse the reliability of a sensor node. Also, a new dependability parameter is introduced, referred to as producibility, which is able to capture the capability of a sensor to accomplish its mission. Two different model solution techniques are proposed, one based on the evaluation of the accumulated reward distribution and the other based on an equivalent model based on non-Markovian stochastic Petri nets. The obtained results are used to investigate the dependability of a whole WSN taking into account the presence of redundant nodes. Topological aspects are taken into account, providing a quantitative comparison among three typical network topologies: star, tree, and mesh. Numerical results are provided in order to highlight the advantages of the proposed technique and to demonstrate the equivalence of the proposed approaches.