Delay Analysis of Wireless Sensor Networks using Queuing Theory

Ubiquitous wireless sensor network are expected to play an important role in the future society for various applications. As a result, carefully managing the network resources to improve the network performance becomes a hot research topic. The common challenges of a WSN are network connectivity, node mobility, energy consumption, data computation and aggregation at sensor nodes. In this paper we focus on intermittency in network connectivity due to mobility of sensor nodes. We propose a new mathematical model to capture a given entire WSN as is with intermittency introduced between the communication links due to mobility. The model involves open GI/G/N queuing networks whereby intermittency durations in communication links are captured in terms of mobility models. The analytical formulas for the performance measures such as average end-to-end delay, packed loss probability, throughput, and average number of hops are derived using the queuing network analyzer and expansion method for models with infinite and finite-buffer nodes, respectively.