Title

SeNDORComm: An Energy-Efficient Priority-Driven Communication Layer for Reliable Wireless Sensor Networks

Date of this Version

December 2007

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.