Deterministic Worst-Case Performance Analysis for Wireless Sensor Networks

Dimensioning wireless sensor networks requires formal methods to guarantee network performance and cost in any conditions. Based on network calculus, this paper presents a deterministic analysis method for evaluating the worst-case performance and buffer cost of sensor networks. To this end, we introduce three general traffic flow operators and derive their delay and buffer bounds. These operators are general because they can be used in combination to model any complex traffic flowing scenarios in sensor networks. Furthermore, our method integrates variable duty cycle to allow the sensor nodes to operate at lower rates thus saving power. Moreover, it incorporates traffic splitting mechanisms in order to balance network workload and nodes' buffers. To show how our method applies to real applications, we conduct a case study on a fresh food tracking application, which monitors the food freshness in realtime. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can be either used to perform network planning before deployment, or to conduct network reconfiguration after deployment.