Modeling the extinction in the information diffusion process in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are useful for gathering information from the environment, either periodically for monitoring purposes or when certain events need to be detected. Since the wireless communication range of each sensor node is limited, data is propagated in a multi-hop manner until it reaches one or more specific sink nodes. However, sensor nodes usually employ a sleep scheduling mechanism for power saving to prolong the operational lifetime of the network and are therefore not always available for forwarding messages received from neighboring nodes. In this paper, we analytically investigate the diffusion behavior of information in a WSN modeled as a two-dimensional spatial branching process. Our analysis permits the derivation of the extinction probability of information being diffused from a source node. Our model permits observing how the activity pattern of each node influences the probability of maintaining time-dependent information in the network.