Network-Calculus-based Performance Analysis for Wireless Sensor Networks

Sammanfattning: Recently, wireless sensor network (WSN) has become a promising technologywith a wide range of applications such as supply chain monitoringand environment surveillance. It is typically composed of multiple tiny devicesequipped with limited sensing, computing and wireless communicationcapabilities. Design of such networks presents several technique challengeswhile dealing with various requirements and diverse constraints. Performanceanalysis techniques are required to provide insight on design parametersand system behaviors.Based on network calculus, we present a deterministic analysis methodfor evaluating the worst-case delay and buffer cost of sensor networks. Tothis end, three general traffic flow operators are proposed and their delayand buffer bounds are derived. These operators can be used in combinationto model any complex traffic flowing scenarios. Furthermore, the methodintegrates a variable duty cycle to allow the sensor nodes to operate at lowrates thus saving power. In an attempt to balance traffic load and improveresource utilization and performance, traffic splitting mechanisms areintroduced for mesh sensor networks. Based on network calculus, the delayand buffer bounds are derived in non-splitting and splitting scenarios.In addition, analysis of traffic splitting mechanisms are extended to sensornetworks with general topologies. To provide reliable data delivery in sensornetworks, retransmission has been adopted as one of the most popularschemes. We propose an analytical method to evaluate the maximum datatransmission delay and energy consumption of two types of retransmissionschemes: hop-by-hop retransmission and end-to-end retransmission.We perform a case study of using sensor networks for a fresh food trackingsystem. Several experiments are carried out in the Omnet++ simulationenvironment. In order to validate the tightness of the two bounds obtainedby the analysis method, the simulation results and analytical results arecompared in the chain and mesh scenarios with various input traffic loads.From the results, we show that the analytic bounds are correct and tight.Therefore, network calculus is useful and accurate for performance analysisof wireless sensor network.