Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been used widely across various industries and business fields that require the coverage of large geographical regions that are difficult for humans to reach. It is therefore important to be able to model, assess, and predict the reliability of WSNs. Masked data is a type of missing data used to represent system failure when the exact cause of the failure is unknown. This paper proposed a novel additive reliability model for a cluster-based WSN system using general masked data and uses the expectation maximization (EM) algorithm to solve the problem of the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Moreover, the proposed model assumes that a WSN comprises several clusters, and the failure processes of these clusters are independent. The probability characteristics of the system are determined according to the topology of the WSN system to evaluate the system reliability. Finally, the proposed model is demonstrated to be powerful for estimating WSN system reliability using a simulated dataset.
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