A practical method for connectivity and coverage reliability analysis for linear wireless sensor networks

Linear Wireless Sensor Networks (LWSNs) are the most suitable wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for monitoring the condition of infrastructures with linear typologies, e.g., railways, gas, or oil pipelines. Reliability of LWSNs is crucial for such applications due to their safety–critical or mission-critical nature. To this end, LWSNs of different designs need to be compared in terms of reliability to ascertain high-cost performance. Connectivity and coverage are fundamental metrics used to measure the reliability of LWSNs. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no proper methods or tools to evaluate the reliability of LWSNs concurrently in terms of connectivity and coverage. In this paper, by reducing the size of system state space depending on the characteristics of LWSNs, we present a practical method for concurrent reliability analysis in terms of connectivity and coverage for LWSNs based on hybrid models of binary decision diagrams and divide-and-conquer schemes. The proposed method can be used to assess various LWSNs, e.g., networks with one or two sink nodes, as well as flat-based or cluster-based networks. Moreover, transmission and coverage ranges can be assigned to sensor nodes using this method. Case studies are presented to substantiate the viability of the proposed model, and some beneficial results are deduced, which can be considered to serve as basic principles for LWSN-design to ensure high-cost performance.