Capacity limitations in wireless sensor networks

It is expected that wireless sensor network will be used in home automation and industrial manufacturing in the future. The main driving forces for wireless sensor networks are fault tolerance, energy gain and spatial capacity gain. Unfortunately, an often forgotten issue is the capacity limits that the network topology of a wireless sensor network represents. In this paper we identify gains, losses and limitations in a wireless sensor network, using a simplified theoretical network model. Especially, we want to point out the stringent capacity limitations that this simplified network model provide. Where a comparison between the locality of the performed information exchange and the average capacity available for each node is the main contribution.