Providing QoS guarantee of timeliness in wireless sensor networks with a new routing methodology

Wide spread use of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in critical applications shows the importance of Quality of service (QoS) in these networks. Timeliness is one of the QoS parameters which has great importance in real time applications such as earthquake detection. Several geographic routing protocols have been proposed for WSNs which provide QoS support in timeliness domain. Most of these protocols use one-hop neighborhood information to make routing decisions. Timeliness can be improved by using multi-hop neighborhood information which increases control overhead and decreases network lifetime. In other words, the choice of two-hop neighborhood information is a tradeoff between timeliness and control overhead. In this paper, we propose a QoS-aware routing protocol, called Maximum Speed Routing Protocol (MSRP) for WSNs to provide QoS-guarantee in timeliness domain. MSRP is based on two-hop neighborhood information with low control overhead and it can improve timeliness by sending packets with maximum speed across the network. Also, MSRP considers the distance between a neighbor and destination to determine next forwarding node and uses a different method to estimate delay between two neighbors. Simulation results show that MSRP improves performance in terms of end-to-end delay, delivery ratio and hop counts.