Simulation and Analysis of Delay Handling Mechanisms in Sensor Networks

Distributed sensor networks have found numerous real life applications. However the endemic ambiguity of real environments can disrupt the communication such that measurements arrive late at the active agent responsible for estimating the dynamics of the measured phenomenon. In this paper we simulate different types of delays and demonstrate the merit of using algorithms that choose to fuse only those delayed measurements that are expected to have considerable utility for the estimation procedure. Simulated results suggest that this approach can lead to energy savings since extra communication steps are avoided. There is also a strong implication that protocols for sensor networks should be coupled with the estimation procedure to facilitate packet-routing based on estimation performance.