In recent years, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have become a crucial technology for infrastructure monitoring. To ensure the reliability of monitoring services, evaluating the network's reliability is particularly important. Sensor nodes are distributed linearly when monitoring linear structures, such as railway bridges, forming what is known as a Linear Wireless Sensor Network (LWSN). Although existing evaluation methods, such as enumeration and Binary Decision Diagram (BDD)-based methods, can be used to assess the reliability of various types of networks, their efficiency is relatively low. Therefore, we classified network states based on the number of failed nodes located at the network's ends and analyzed the arrangement characteristics of nodes under different network states. This paper proposed a new reliability assessment method for LWSNs. This method is based on the combinatorial patterns of nodes and uses the concept of integer partitions to calculate the total number of states at different performance levels, applying probability formulas to assess network reliability. Compared to Multi-Valued Decision Diagram (MDD)-based evaluation algorithms, this method is suitable for large-scale LWSNs and offers lower time complexity.
Keywords: LWSNs; failure probability; number splitting; performance level; reliability evaluation.