Modeling latency—lifetime trade-off for target detection in mobile sensor networks

Two important measures of performance for the surveillance applications of the mobile sensor networks are detection latency and system lifetime. Previous work on modeling detection delay has assumed that sensor measurements are delivered to the fusion center with zero delay. Such approaches can require excessive energy, resulting into reduced lifetime. This article argues that a trade-off between detection latency and system lifetime can be made by employing an energy aware transmission scheme. The article formulates the trade-off as an optimization problem, and presents an analytic method to model both detection latency and system lifetime. The model is substantiated by using simulation.