3-Hop-ahead path reservation scheme for expedite traffic in wireless sensor networks

Recent technological advances enable many different types of sensors to be installed on one node, resulting in various traffics existing in one network. Such networks should handle the traffics differently according to their relative importance and urgency; that is, QoS support is required. In this paper, we propose 3-hop-ahead path reservation for expedite traffic, which reserves at least 3 hops along the path prior to transmitting data. The proposed mechanism avoids inter-node priority inversion problem by suppressing lower-priority nodes transmission, and minimizes reservation delay by performing path reservation in parallel with data transmission. Simulation has shown that the proposed mechanism works well, especially when the packet size is large.