Intertwined medium access scheduling of upstream and downstream traffic in wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, the sensor data are often aggregated en-route to the base-station in order to eliminate redundancy and conserve the network resources. The base-station not only acts as a destination for the upstream data traffic, but it also configures the network by transmitting commands downstream to nodes. The data delivery latency is a critical performance metric in time-sensitive applications and is considered by a number of data aggregation schemes in the literature. However, to the best of our knowledge, no solution has considered the scheduling of downstream packets, originated from the base-station, in conjunction with upstream data aggregation traffic. This paper fills such a gap and proposes MASAUD, which intertwines the medium access schedule of upstream and downstream traffic in order to reuse time slots in a non-conflicting manner and reduce delay. MASAUD can be integrated with any scheme for data aggregation scheduling. The simulation confirms the effectiveness of MASAUD.