Modeling the lifetime of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

This paper reviews the existing lifetime models of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) as well as the additional factors influencing the lifetime of WMSNs compared with conventional WSNs. Considering the relationship between individual sensors and the whole network, the importance of each sensor based on its position and the number of alive nodes is given. Then we propose a novel model to formally define the lifetime of WMSNs as the number of data packets the network has handled before its death based on energy by taking into consideration the heterogeneity, network latency, data rate, and data accuracy. Our purpose is to contribute a more general and accurate lifetime model of WMSNs.