Lower Bound Estimation for Required Number of Nodes in the Opportunistic Communication - Based Wireless Sensor Network

摘要

We are developing an opportunistic communication based wireless sensor network system to gather and analyze the data of sediment transport in the desert for desertification research. There are two kinds of nodes in our system, one is base station and the other is sensor node, which can move randomly driven by wind and forward the data to the base station while they are encountering. Science the number of nodes has large impact on performance like success rate of data forward, lifetime and cost of the system, it is significant to estimate the lower bound for the required number of sensor nodes. In this paper, through some assumption and simplification, we give a simple formula to estimate the minimum number of sensor nodes that the system need to ensure opportunistic encounter between nodes will occur to make the data can be forwarded.