Routing wireless real-time traffic using minimum spanning trees

The development of a protocol for wireless ad-hoc networks is challenging since this type of protocols must take into account several aspects like mobility, stability, bandwidth and scalability. If we add other requisites like real-time support, the challenge is even more difficult. In this paper we propose a protocol for wireless real-time communications in MANETs especially thought for mobile robotics applications. It is based on the Real-Time Wireless Multi-hop Protocol (RT-WMP) but uses a tree-based routing algorithm that reduces its overhead and increases its scalability. Moreover, it is able to broadcast a message to all members of the network in the same worst-case as the unicast delivery of the RT-WMP. The protocol has been tested by means of both simulation and real experiments using a mobile robot and a set of relay nodes.