The recent development of small wireless sensing devices has opened the door for a plethora of new applications. In a typical application, these battery-powered and failure-prone sensor nodes are required to operated autonomously for extended period of time. In this work, we propose analytical models, system-level support, and network protocols that move WSNs forward toward autonomous, dependable, energy efficient, and cost effective WSNs. Our work falls into two major categories. First, we use analytical models to formalize and quantify WSN dependability characteristics, these models allow for the systematic integration of WSN dependability as a primary dimension in the design space of the communication stack protocols and algorithms as well as the deployment problem. Second, we propose a novel structure of the WSN communication stack based on our Sensor Core (Score). In the context of Score, we propose and develop fundamental network services that perform automatic low-level discovery services such as neighbor and topology discovery. Score along with discovery services provide a framework that hosts our protocols and provide them with system-level support to collaborate and coordinate with each other in a cross-layer approach.
