On the Use of Graphs for Node Connectivity in Wireless Sensor Networks for Hostile Environments

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have been extensively studied in the literature. However, in hostile environments where node connectivity is severely compromised, the system performance can be greatly affected. In this work, we consider such a hostile environment where sensor nodes cannot directly communicate to some neighboring nodes. Building on this, we propose a distributed data gathering scheme where data packets are stored in different nodes throughout the network instead to considering a single sink node. As such, if nodes are destroyed or damaged, some information can still be retrieved. To evaluate the performance of the system, we consider the properties of different graphs that describe the connections among nodes. It is shown that the degree distribution of the graph has an important impact on the performance of the system. A teletraffic analysis is developed to study the average buffer size and average packet delay. To this end, we propose a reference node approach, which entails an approximation for the mathematical modeling of these networks that effectively simplifies the analysis and approximates the overall performance of the system.