Abstract
In many reliable Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications, messages have different priorities depending on urgency or importance. For example, a message reporting the failure of all nodes in a region is more important than that for a single node. Moreover, traffic can be bursty in nature, such as when a correlated error is reported by multiple nodes running identical code. Current communication layers in WSNs lack efficient support for these two requirements. We present a priority-driven communication layer, called SeNDORComm, that schedules transmission of packets driven by application-specified priority, buffers and packs multiple messages in a packet, and honors latency guarantee for a message. We show that SeNDORComm improves energy efficiency, message reliability, network utilization and delays congestion collapse in a network. We extensively evaluate SeNDORComm using analysis, simulation and real experiments. We demonstrate the improvement in goodput of SeNDORComm over a default communication layer (134.78% for a network of 20 nodes), such as GenericComm in TinyOS.
Keywords
Wireless sensor network, reliable message delivery, congestion collapse, priority driven
Date of this Version
December 2007