ABSTRACT
This chapter is devoted to present methodologies for the design of reliable sensor networks without considering requirements of accuracy. Estimability goals are also omitted, but they are somehow connected to reliability. Indeed, increasing the degree of estimability of a variable is equivalent to increasing the number of ways the variable is calculated. The estimation reliability of a variable has the same monotonic behavior, but, unfortunately, there is no one-to-one relation between both so that they cannot be considered equivalent. Therefore, although estimability goals can be useful when the service availability of sensors is not known, the design using estimability goals can be more costly than one based on hard instrument reliability data.
