Bounds on the lifetime of wireless sensor networks with lossy links and directional antennae

S. OLOFSSON; J.M. ALONSO; T. VOIGT; A. NORDHAM

Wireless Network Performance Enhancement via Directional Antennas: Models, Protocols, and Systems

CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group

Lugar: Boca Raton, London, New York; Año: 2018; p. 329 - 363

Energy-effciency and longevity are of major importance in wireless sensor networks (WSN) as they have a large impact on the usefulness and cost of the target application. While there has been a tremendous amount of research on energy-e cient WSNs, relatively few studies have been performed that have aimed at quanti ying the gains of using directional antennas [1]. Toward this end, we describe a method to bound the lifetime of WSN developed earlier [2,3], that can be extended to cover directional antennas. The method?s aim is to find bounds on the energy consumption of nodes, regardless of the routing used. The main problem is to find a lower bound, which is then used to obtain an upper bound on the lifetime.We begin with an informal description of the method in its simplest form, where networks contain no directional antennas and links are not lossy but perfect. We then proceed to explain the method in full generality, where networks can contain directional antennas and links are lossy. In both cases, definitions and results are stated rigorously and explained carefully, but no proofs are offered. The interested reader is referred to References 2 and 3 for some of the proofs. The proof of the most general result, as well as other examples of application, will be published elsewhere.In the final sections the relevance of the explicit bounds obtained in the theory is demonstrated by simulations with a practical MAC layer.