PhD Forum: Delay Guarantees of a Mobile Wireless Sensor Network using Stochastic Network Calculus

Wirelessly connected sensors are increasingly used in critical applications, e.g. firefighters or drone rescuing team, raising the need to quantify performance guarantees. In this work, we characterize the end-to-end delay on a Mobile Wireless Sensor Network (MWSN) with an analytical method based on Stochastic Network Calculus (SNC) with Moment Generating Functions (MGFs). The particularity of the studied scenario is that the network is composed of two segments: one with multiple nodes connected by a contention-based channel using the Distributed Coordination Function (DCF), and another consisting of a link prone to disconnection due to the mobility pattern of the nodes in the first segment. Numerical performance bounds are provided for an example application in which the effects of per-node offered load, scheduling algorithms and connectivity on the link to the sink are quantified for different network sizes.