Static worst-case energy and lifetime estimation of wireless sensor networks

With the advance of computer and communication technologies, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are increasingly used in many aspects of our daily life. However, since the battery lifetime of WSN nodes is restricted, the WSN lifetime is also limited. Therefore, it is crucial to determine this limited lifetime in advance for preventing service interruptions in critical applications. This paper proposes a feasible static analysis approach to estimate the worst-case lifetime of a WSN. Assuming known routes with a given sensor network topology and S-MAC as the underlying MAC protocol, we statically estimate the lifetime of each sensor node with a fixed initial energy budget. These estimations are then compared with the results obtained through simulation which run with the same energy budget on each node. Experimental results of our research on TinyOS applications indicate that our approach can safely and accurately estimate the worst-case lifetime of WSNs. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first one to estimate the worst-case lifetime of WSNs through static analysis method.