Petri Nets as an Analysis Tool For Data Flow in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract—We present a method to analyse the be-haviour of wireless sensor networks (WSN) with a mul-tihop architecture, where the sensor nodes are conveying gathered information into a sink node. In particular, we are interested in analysing the impact of data aggregation in intermediate nodes, comparing the increase of the time of arrival of messages to the sink node with the decrease of total messages sent by the whole network. One can use this approach to perform a pre-deployment optimization of the network parameters, so that its lifetime is increased while keeping the messages delay within a certain threshold. I