Aimed at the difficulties in accurately, comprehensively and systematically evaluating the reliability of industrial wireless sensor networks （WSNs）, a time-evolving state transition-Monte Carlo （TEST-MC） evaluation method and a novel network function value representation method are proposed to evaluate the reliability of the IWSNs. First, the adjacency matrix method is used to characterize three typical topologies of WSNs including the mesh network, tree network and ribbon network. Secondly, the network function value method is used to evaluate the network connectivity, and the TEST-MC evaluation method is used to evaluate network reliability and availability. Finally, the variations in the reliability, connectivity and availability of these three topologies are presented. Simulation results show that the proposed method can quickly analyze the reliability of the networks containing typical WSN topologies, which provides an effective method for the comprehensive and accurate evaluation of the reliability of WSNs.
