Power Aware Fulfilment of Latency Requirements by Exploiting Heterogeneity in Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks

One can imagine a lot of realistic scenarios, such as home or factory automation, where a wide variety of sensors and actuators form a wireless network in order to perform various tasks. There is still a lot of work to be done to ensure scalable and reliable functionality of such a heterogeneous network. We present a MAC layer algorithm that ensures end-to-end latency requirements while minimizing maintenance. We demonstrate that our algorithm scales down the duty cycles along constrained paths in such a way that nodes with more capabilities take on more responsibility in meeting the end-to-end application constraints.