Network lifetime bounds for hierarchical wireless sensor networks in the presence of energy constraints

In previous years, one popular problem that is constantly being researched into is how to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Many approaches to maximize network lifetime have been proposed and each approach provides different levels of energy savings and are efficient in their own aspects. However, these proposed algorithms are not suitable for use in a hard network lifetime environment where participating sensors should be working till the strict network lifetime requirement. The predictability of the network lifetime plays an important role in supporting guaranteed network lifetime services. This can be provided through the schedulability test that complements the online operations of safe and critical sensor network systems. In this paper, we focus on the study of the predictability of the network lifetime to enable the High Energy First clustering algorithm (HEF) to work in a hard lifetime environment and present a schedulability test to verify whether HEF can make the set of sensors schedulable in terms of N-of- N and K-of- N alive nodes.