Investigating the Impact of Optimal Data Transfer Intervals on Failure-Prone Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) typically consist of failure-prone sensor nodes and more reliable sink nodes. To prevent data loss, sensor nodes must regularly transfer their data to sink nodes. Therefore, setting an appropriate data transfer interval between them is crucial. This letter presents a method to optimize the data transfer interval using a Markov model. Although the Markov model directly implies the assumption of exponentially distributed failures' interarrival times, using extensive simulations, we showed that the optimal data transfer interval derived by this model still performs exceptionally well under other failure distributions with less than 7.3% difference in terms of period of data loss compared to the true optimal data transfer interval. We also discuss how to integrate the proposed method into the widely used communication protocol in WSN, TDMA, and show that it can improve data collection time and energy efficiency.