On the Reliability of Wireless Sensor Networks Communications

International audienceMore and more Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) applica- tions and protocols are proposed. Notably, critical applications, which must meet time and reliability requirements. Works on the real-time ca- pability of WSNs have been proposed [1]. In this paper we propose to study the achievable reliability of WSNs, tacking into account the prob- abilistic nature of the radio link. We define the reliability of a WSN to be the probability that an end-to-end communication is successful (i.e. the packet is received by the sink). We propose a theoretical framework inspired by a reference model [5]. We use the framework to derive the reliability of two types of routing schemes: unicast-based and broadcast- based. We show that in the case of broadcast-based, the sink is a relia- bility bottleneck of the network. We also discuss the impact of the MAC scheme on the reliability