On the impact of manufacturing process variations on the lifetime of sensor networks

The lifetime of individual nodes in a sensor network depends strongly on the leakage power of the nodes in idle state. With technology scaling, variability in leakage power dissipation of sensor nodes will cause increased variability in their lifetimes. In this article, we analyze how the lifetime variations of sensor nodes affect the performance of the sensor network as a whole. We demonstrate the use of the proposed framework to explore deployment cost versus performance trade-offs for sensor networks. Results indicate that up to 37% improvement in the critical lifetime of a sensor network can be obtained with a 20% increase in deployment cost.