A performance modeling of wireless sensor networks as a queueing network with on and off servers

In this work, we consider performance modeling of a wireless sensor network with a time division multiple access (TDMA) media access protocol with slot reuse. It is assumed that all the nodes are peers of each other and they have two modes of operation, active and sleep modes. We model the sensor network as a Jackson network with unreliable nodes with on and off states. Active and sleep modes of sensor nodes are modeled with on and off states of unreliable nodes. We determine the joint distribution of the sensor node queue lengths in the network. From this result, we derive the probability distribution of the number of active nodes and blocking probability of node activation. Then, we present the mean packet delay, average sleep period of a node and the network throughput. We present numerical results as well as simulation results to verify the analysis. Finally, we discuss how the derived results may be used in the design of sensor networks.