Reliability Research and Analysis of Sink Node in Wireless Sensor Networks

Node is the basic unit for the wireless sensor network, its reliability is the premise of ensuring network reliable operation, and due to sink node is taken as routing equipment of the network, the reliability of sink node is directly related to whether data could be reliably transmitted to the user. So it is necessary to improve the reliability of node data transmission. A kind of node reliability method was put forward on the basis of analyzing the structure features of hierarchical WSN and summarizing the fault sources of nodes in the paper, namely, the reliability of sink node was considered from two aspects of hardware and software, and it was improved by drawing lessons from the spare parts measure used to improve mechanical reliability and combing the retransmission mechanism adopted by soft fault. The reliability functional model was established on the basis of qualitative analysis of important parameter which has effect on node reliability. By using Markov status graph and probability analysis, quantitatively analyzing spare parts number and retransmission times influence on the reliability, and the quantitative relationships among retransmission times, communication time and energy consumption were built. Under the premise of the normal operation of Software-Hardware, in order to specific studied on node reliability, we are done experiments from three aspects of obstacle, transmission distance and transmit power, and test results are obtained by analyzing variation and mean of LQI. Experimental results shown that compared with normal sink node, the sink node in this paper could avoid the transient faults in communication link, thus it has stronger anti-interference ability, and larger packet reception rate while transmission distance is longer or transmit power is less. Copyright © 2014 IFSA Publishing, S. L.