End-to-End Delay and Network Lifetime Analysis in a Wireless Sensor Network Performing Data Aggregation

Data aggregation is a promising approach for reducing energy consumption and relaying of redundant data in wireless sensor networks for monitoring applications. However data aggregation implies, on the one hand, an increase in network processing at certain nodes, referred to as aggregators, possibly leading to a higher delivery delay to the sink. On the other hand, the advantages of using aggregation are numerous, especially under the perspective of energy consumption reduction and network lifetime increase. In this paper we provide a closed form expression for the end-to-end delay and network lifetime distributions in a wireless sensor network employing aggregation. These derivations can be used to provide some insights on the expected performance in terms of the metrics above mentioned, when data aggregation is used. For example, if a certain constraint on the maximum tolerable delivery delay is given, ¿*, this can be useful to characterize what is the probability to satisfy this constraint.