Dependability of Wireless Sensor Networks

As wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are becoming ever more prevalent, the runtime characteristics of these networks are becoming an increasing issue. Commonly, external sources of interference make WSNs behave in a different manner to that expected from within simplistic simulations, resulting in the need to use additional systems which monitor the state of the network. Despite dependability of WSNs being an increasingly important issue, there are still only a limited number of works within this specific field, with the majority of works focusing on ensuring that specific devices are operational, not the application as a whole. This work instead aims to look at the dependability of WSNs from an application-centric view, taking into account the possible ways in which the application may fail and using the application's requirements to focus on assuring dependability.