The self-organization paradigm of wireless sensor networks (WSN) deals with an emergent behavior which can be either a connected logical topology (e.g. virtual backbone) or a non connected one (e.g. clusters): the network is then structured. Based on such logical view of the network, communications protocols should be more efficient than based on a classical flat approach. Numerous studies deal with performance evaluation of these virtual backbones and clusters in terms of energy consumption, complexity, etc. Nevertheless, the network is always assumed fully deployed. In our point of view, a more accurate analysis should be done in order to characterize self- organization strategies during the different steps of the WSN life. We propose to study the key properties like robustness, latency or cardinality of the main self-organization strategies (MPR, MPR-DS, CDS-rule k, CDS-MIS) during the chaotic network deployment (birth phase), the working life dealing with self-healing and the death of nodes.