A Comprehensive Worst-Case Calculus for Wireless Sensor Networks with In-Network Processing

Today's wireless sensor networks (WSN) focus on energy-efficiency as the main metric to optimize. However, an increasing number of scenarios where sensor networks are considered for time-critical purposes in application scenarios like intrusion detection, industrial monitoring, or health care systems demands for an explicit support of performance guarantees in WSNs and, thus, in turn for a respective mathematical framework. In (J. Schmitt and U. Roedig, 2005) , a sensor network calculus was introduced in order to accommodate a worst-case analysis of WSNs. This sensor network calculus focused on the communication aspect in WSNs, but had not yet a possibility to treat in-network processing in WSNs. In this work, we now incorporate in-network processing features as they are typical for WSNs by taking into account computational resources on the sensor nodes. Furthermore, we propose a simple, yet effective priority queue management discipline which achieves a good balance of response times across sensor nodes in the field.