Leveraging on Mobility Models for Sensor Network Lifetime Modeling

This work extends the state of the art in the modeling of the lifetime of a sensor network. This is performed concentrating on the peculiarities exhibited by a specific, but realistic scenario, surveillance sensor networks, sensor networks in charge of reporting the passage of targets across an area of interest. Focusing on surveillance sensor networks, we here show that a useful lifetime definition can be directly derived from the targets mobility model. In fact, instead of resorting to abstract lifetime or coverage indices, we here derive the lifetime of a sensor network as the time when a target is first able to cross the area of interest without being detected, studying such variable in terms of its stochastic model. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first contribution which approaches the problem of assessing the lifetime of a sensor network building upon the mobility model of its targets, while adopting a fully probabilistic approach to perform such type of analysis.