Effect of redundancy on the mean time to failure of wireless sensor networks

Abstract In data‐driven wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the system must perform data sensing and retrieval and possibly aggregate data as a response at runtime. As a WSN is often deployed unattended in areas where replacements of failed sensors are difficult, energy conservation is of primary concern. While the use of redundancy is desirable in terms of satisfying user queries to cope with sensor and transmission faults, it may adversely shorten the lifetime of the WSN, as more sensor nodes will have to be used to answer queries, causing the energy of the system to drain quickly. In this paper, we analyze the effect of redundancy on the mean time to failure (MTTF) of a WSN in terms of the number of queries the system is able to answer correctly before it fails due to either sensor/transmission faults or energy depletion. In particular, we analyze the effect of redundancy on the MTTF of cluster‐structured WSNs for energy conservations. We show that a tradeoff exists between redundancy and MTTF. Furthermore, an optimal redundancy level exists such that the MTTF of the system is maximized. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.