QoS assessment for mission-critical Wireless Sensor Network applications

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) must ensure worst-case end-to-end delay and reliability guarantees for mission-critical applications. TDMA-based scheduling offers delay guarantees, thus it is used in industrial monitoring and automation. We propose to evolve pairs of TDMA schedule and routing-tree in a cross-layer in order to fulfill multiple conflicting QoS requirements, exemplified by latency and reliability. The genetic algorithm we utilize can be used as an analytical tool for both the feasibility and expected QoS in production. Near-optimal cross-layer solutions are found within seconds and can be directly enforced into the network.