Abstract
Rapid advancement in micro-electromechanical techniques leads to the wide application of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In a linear WSN (LWSN), all sensor nodes are arranged in a straight line to monitor health status of some linear infrastructure structure such as bridges, highways, pipelines, etc. To enhance reliability of the infrastructure monitoring services, LWSNs are often designed to incorporate a limited number of backbone nodes for transferring or relaying information, leading to a more complex hybrid structure. In this paper, a multivalued decision diagram (MDD)-based analytical approach is proposed to evaluate performance of an LWSN system with backbone nodes. Particularly, we model and analyze the probability that the hybrid LWSN performs at a particular performance level, which is characterized by the number of sensor nodes being able to reach the base station. A single compact MDD model is constructed by sharing all isomorphic submodel structures involved in different performance levels. The MDD model, once being constructed, can be reused for evaluation using different failure time distributions or mission time. A case study is presented to substantiate the application of the proposed MDD approach for developing the optimal backbone node allocation strategy to guarantee the reliability requirement on the infrastructure monitoring services.