Network Criticality Analysis for Finite Sized Wireless Sensor Networks

TL;DR

This paper derives analytical formulas for network criticality in finite wireless sensor networks, analyzing their robustness to topology changes due to node failures, with applications in critical communication and surveillance systems.

Contribution

It introduces new analytical formulas for network criticality in r-nearest neighbor networks and compares them with simulations to assess robustness factors.

Findings

Analytical formulas accurately predict network criticality.

Network criticality increases with number of nodes and neighbors.

Network robustness varies with network dimension.

Abstract

The topology of a sensor network changes very frequently due to node failures because of power constraints or physical destruction. Robustness to topology changes is one of the important design factors of wireless sensor networks which makes them suitable to military, communications, health and surveillance applications. Network criticality is a measure which capture the properties of network robustness to environmental changes. In this work, we derived the analytical formulas for network criticality, normalized network criticality and studied the network robustness for r-nearest neighbor cycle and r-nearest neighbor torus networks. Further, we compared our analytical results with simulation results and studied the effect of number of nodes, nearest neighbors and network dimension on the network criticality and normalized network criticality.