Design and Evaluation of a Wireless Sensor Network Architecture for Fast and Reliable Transmission of Urgent Information

Wireless sensor networks used as a social infrastructure must be capable of differentiating and prioritizing transmission of urgent sensor information over other non-urgent information. In this paper, we show a network design methodology where several mechanisms which function in different spatial and temporal levels are integrated to adapt to an emergency situation in a self-organizing and distributed manner. We also present a novel and simple network architecture designed following the methodology. In this architecture, sensor information is classified into three traffic classes and each node activates one or more of several simple, self-organizing, and fully-distributed mechanisms in accordance with the scale of an emergency for fast and reliable transmission of urgent sensor information. Our simulation experiments showed that the architecture successfully improved the delivery ratio and delay of the urgent sensor information under both a small scale and large scale emergencies.