On the Delay Performance Analysis in a Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Network

We present a comprehensive delay performance measurement and analysis in an operational large-scale urban wireless sensor network. We build a light-weight delay measurement system in such a network and present a robust method to calculate per-packet delay. Through analysis of delay and system metrics, we seek to answer the following fundamental questions: what are the spatial and temporal characteristics of delay performance in a real network? what are the most important impacting factors and is there any practical model to capture those factors? what are the implications to protocol design? In this paper, we explore the important factors from the data in presence of various metrics and randomness, and show that the important factors are not necessarily the same with that in Internet. Further, we propose a delay model to capture those factors and validate it in the network. We revisit several prevalent protocol designs such as Collection Tree Protocol, opportunistic routing and Dynamic Switching based Forwarding, and show the implications to protocol designs.