Abstract
Sensitivity or importance analysis has been widely used for identifying system weaknesses and supporting system improvement and maintenance activities. Despite the rich literature on the sensitivity analysis of many mission-critical and safety-critical systems, no existing work has been devoted to wireless sensor networks (WSN). In this paper, we first analyze link and node importance with respect to the infrastructure communication reliability of WSN systems. The binary decision diagrams based algorithms are implemented to evaluate and compare three importance measures: structural importance measure, Birnbaum's measure, and criticality importance measure. The effects of node degree, choice of the destination node, data delivery models, as well as mission time on the importance analysis results are investigated through examples. Results from this work can facilitate the design, deployment, and maintenance of reliable WSN for critical applications. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.