Traffic congestion and the lifetime of networks with moving nodes

For many power-limited networks, such as wireless sensor networks and mobile ad hoc networks, maximizing the network lifetime is the first concern in the related designing and maintaining activities. We study the network lifetime from the perspective of network science. In our model, nodes are initially assigned a fixed amount of energy moving in a square area and consume the energy when delivering packets. We obtain four different traffic regimes: no, slow, fast, and absolute congestion regimes, which are basically dependent on the packet generation rate. We derive the network lifetime by considering the specific regime of the traffic flow. We find that traffic congestion inversely affects network lifetime in the sense that high traffic congestion results in short network lifetime. We also discuss the impacts of factors such as communication radius, node moving speed, routing strategy, etc., on network lifetime and traffic congestion.