Computer Science and Engineering, Department of

 

Date of this Version

2008

Comments

Published in 33rd IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks, 2008. LCN 2008. Copyright 2008 IEEE. Used by permission.

Abstract

Supporting end-to-end real-time communication is important for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to accomplish the collaborative sensing tasks with specific timing constraints. However, without considering the unique constraints for WSNs, many existing real-time communication protocols prove to be infeasible for low-cost WSNs. In this paper, we propose a novel real-time communication scheme (RCS) to provide service-differentiated soft real-time guarantees for end-to-end communication in WSNs. We use hop-based geographic grouping to enable location awareness for sensor nodes with extremely low control overhead.We use dynamic forwarding with load-balanced receiver contention to provide a light-weight, yet efficient, routing technique, which can be easily adapted for duty cycle design. We use polling contention period based real-time MAC support to improve the service-differentiation granularity with better bandwidth utilization. The performance evaluation shows that our scheme can achieve low end-to-end latency, high on-time delivery ratio, fine services-differentiation granularity with load-balance for real-time traffic in unsynchronized low-cost WSNs.

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