Abstract
This paper considers the problem of modeling and analyzing the infrastructure communication reliability (ICR) of wireless sensor networks (WSN) subject to common-cause failures (CCF). Three different data delivery models, i.e., sink unicast, sink multicast, and sink broadcast are considered, and three ICR metrics are developed correspondingly. The reliability problems and evaluation approaches are formulated for WSN with a hierarchical clustered architecture. Nevertheless, the proposed generic approach can be easily adapted for the reliability analysis of WSN with other communication topologies such as mesh, star, and tree. The evaluation approach integrates a progressive reduction scheme based on binary decision diagrams for the reliability analysis, and a divide-and-conquer approach for considering the effect of CCF. Two WSN examples with mesh and hierarchical clustered topologies respectively are analyzed to illustrate the advantages and application of the proposed approach. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]