Statistical response time bounds in randomly deployed wireless sensor networks

Response time bounds are important for many application scenarios of wireless sensor networks (WSN). Often, during the planning phase of a WSN its topology is not known. It rather results from a deployment process. This makes the provision of deterministic response time bounds difficult. In this paper, we strive for statistical response time bounds in WSNs that take the stochastic nature of the deployment process into account. Based on a Monte Carlo method we derive estimates for quantiles of the maximum response time distribution under uncertainty about the topology. In numerical experiments we show that the long but light tail of this distribution causes considerably lower bounds compared to the deterministic one even under small violation probabilities and, yet, on the other hand compare favourably with the median of the distribution.