On the Data Delivery Delay taken by Random Walks in Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years, the use of random walk techniques in wireless sensor networks has attracted considerable interest among numerous research efforts. The popularity of this approach is attributed to the natural properties of random walks such as locality, simplicity, low-overhead and inherent robustness. However, throughout the variety of research works that assess the effectiveness of random walk techniques, most results are derived from a qualitative view or by means of simulations. Furthermore, when analytical tools are used, the obtained results often provide bounds on various performance metrics of interest, which may have little consequences for practical applications. Instead, our goal in this paper is to quantify the effectiveness of such techniques based on the derivation of closed-form expressions.In particular, we focus on the delay taken for the random walk to deliver messages from sensor to sink nodes and study its statistics through closed-form derivations.