A Space-Time Analytical Model for Energy Consumption in Wireless Sensor Networks

Sensor network lifetime suffers from increased energy consumption especially for those nodes in close proximity to the sink node that undertake rather the role of forwarding other nodes' data packets than their own. In this paper, a space-time analytical model is proposed to characterize the energy consumed in a sensor network under a rather simple medium access control policy. The proposed analytical model is studied and analyzed in this paper revealing a phase transition phenomenon as the offered traffic load increases. Simulation results presented here are in compliance with the aforementioned analytical results.