Delay aware reliable transport in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are event-based systems that rely on the collective effort of several sensor nodes. Reliable event detection at the sink is based on collective information provided by the sensor nodes and not on any individual sensor data. Hence, conventional end-to-end reliability definitions and solutions are inapplicable in the WSN regime and would only lead to a waste of scarce sensor resources. Moreover, the reliability objective of WSN must be achieved within a certain real-time delay bound posed by the application. Therefore, the WSN paradigm necessitates a collective delay-constrained event-to-sink reliability notion rather than the traditional end-to-end reliability approaches. To the best of our knowledge, there is no transport protocol solution which addresses both reliability and real-time delay bound requirements of WSN simultaneously. In this paper, the delay aware reliable transport (DART) protocol is presented for WSN. The objective of the DART protocol is to timely and reliably transport event features from the sensor field to the sink with minimum energy consumption. In this regard, the DART protocol simultaneously addresses congestion control and timely event transport reliability objectives in WSN. In addition to its efficient congestion detection and control algorithms, it incorporates the time critical event first (TCEF) scheduling mechanism to meet the application-specific delay bounds at the sink node. Importantly, the algorithms of the DART protocol mainly run on resource rich sink node, with minimal functionality required at resource constrained sensor nodes. Furthermore, the DART protocol can accommodate multiple concurrent event occurrences in a wireless sensor field. Performance evaluation via simulation experiments show that the DART protocol achieves high performance in terms of real-time communication requirements, reliable event detection and energy consumption in WSN. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.