Combined Scheduling and Routing for Deterministic Guarantee of End-to-End Deadlines in Cell Structured Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks have great potentials to be applied to mission critical real-time applications such as target tracking, emergency detection, and disaster management. For such real-time applications, sensory data should be delivered within the end-to-end deadlines; otherwise, the data may become useless or misleading. In order to provide such deterministic guarantee of end-to-end deadlines, not only packet scheduling within a single hop but also routing across multiple hops have to be jointly considered. In this paper, we propose a combined scheduling and routing mechanism that provides a deterministic guarantee of end-to-end deadlines leveraging real-time scheduling and analysis techniques. Our experimental study shows that the proposed mechanism can accommodate a larger workload meeting all the end-to-end deadlines than a pretty comprehensive set of other possible solutions of scheduling and routing that are known to deterministically guarantee end-to-end deadlines.