Reliability of wireless sensor network: Hotspot and critical challenges

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) has attracted many concerns in different domains because of its special features. A WSN is a set of a large number of resource constrained sensor nodes which have abilities for information detection, data processing, and short-range radio communication. WSN can be used for both military applications and civil applications with the tasks such as detection and monitoring of significant events in different environments or large areas. How to improve the reliability of WSN is one of the essential challenges for WSN from theoretical research to actual application. Five hot research interests have been discussed respectively in this paper, and several relevant state-of-the-art technologies have been analyzed, then, future direction and critical technologies are proposed as well. In addition, a Generalized Stochastic Petri nets (GSPN) model is designed to evaluate the reliability of a parallel-redundant fault tolerant WSN. GSPN model is more observable, scalable and portable than Markov model.