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

Abstract

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 data delivery delay taken for the random walk to deliver messages from sensor to sink nodes and study its statistics through closed-form derivations.

Packet Delay and Energy Consumption in Non-homogeneous Networks

“…In this area, there are many results for special cases of network graphs. In [25], the mean and variance of the hitting time were obtained for a torus-lattice network graph when the next node visited is selected at random among all neighbours leading to an unbiased walk. The analysis indicates that with these assumptions and in such networks, the probability distribution of packet delivery time is approximately geometrically distributed.…”

Lattice Green functions and diffusion for modelling traffic routing in ad hoc networks

“…We show in this section that the previous results are related to modelling the number of paths arriving at a given point in a regular ad hoc network. During the course of this work we were not aware of the excellent work of [12]- [14]. Interesting developments on ad hoc networks are also found in [15], [16].…”