A delay-sensitive strategy for real-time monitoring in wireless sensor networks

Advances in the research of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) have allowed their use for several purposes, including monitoring of critical and dangerous environments. Applications in these environments share the need of operation without human intervention, which imposes autonomy and efficiency in executing their tasks, even under critical environmental conditions. Besides the traditional WSN physical limitations, their utilization as a source of collecting data in challenging environments requires the ability to support real-time observations of the monitoring environment. These observations should consider not only environment unpredictability with respect to mobility but also the variable amount of nodes and collected data. To deal with that, in this paper we propose a delay-sensitive strategy, which aims to enable WSN for monitoring challenging environments, taking into account real-time data constraints as well as mobility and limitations of the sensor nodes. This strategy is implemented in a new routing protocol, called PROST.