Distance Distribution-Based Modeling and Analysis for Pipelined-Forwarding Sensor Networks

To improve energy efficiency for energy-constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), duty-cycling techniques have been widely studied and adopted in the design of Media Access Control protocols. On the other hand, to alleviate the well-known sleep latency issue caused by duty-cycling techniques, the study on pipelined forwarding over duty cycling has also attracted plenty of attention from researchers. Noticing that in the current literature for a typical duty-cycled pipelined-forwarding protocol, there is lack of physical interference model which takes into account the effect of cumulative interference, this paper fills the gap by proposing such a model based on nodal distance distributions. Based on the model, the distribution of Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) achieved at the receiver can be obtained, and the performance metrics that are functions of SINR, such as outage probability and link capacity, can be analyzed. We utilize the proposed model to conduct performance evaluations for a WSN with the pipelined- forwarding feature and investigate the tradeoff among packet delivery latency, energy efficiency, and network capacity by setting an important network parameter, called sleep factor, which determines how long a node can turn its radio off every cycle.