Lifetime evaluation model for Wireless Sensor Networks based on mote redundancy

Wireless Sensor Networks are able to sense large amount of physical environments with low energy consumption. In order to achieve that, the battery-powered wireless motes have to optimize the usage of their batteries to make them last longer. However, these motes must keep doing the main purpose for which they were deployed, that is, sampling the environment. These requirements provide a research framework in which many authors have been studying in the last years. They have stated several different descriptions of "sensor network lifetime". Some definitions measure the time when the first network mote stops working (due to the lack of battery energy). Other definitions keep track of the time spent until a certain amount of motes fail. In these cases, the network lifetime is independent of the sampled environment and does not take into account redundancy and fault tolerance. Using a new innovative concept of network lifetime, a new battery-powered WSN lifetime model based in data redundacy and hardware redundacy is proposed. With this model, energy consumption can be minimized, and therefore, a reduction in the change of batteries is obtained. The proposed method also provides a new metric which determines when a network stops being useful.