On the lifetime of large scale sensor networks

Network lifetime is an important metric for battery operated sensor networks. In this paper, we study the lifetime of a large scale sensor network with n randomly deployed sensors communicating with a base station (BS), where each sensor node has the same probability to sense and report its data to the BS. We show how the lifetime of such kind of sensor networks is influenced by transmission schemes, network density and transceiver parameters with different constraints on network mobility, position awareness and maximum transmission range. Our results offer insight into the network deployment and protocol design that optimize the network lifetime.