Title: Preemptive emergency medium access for wireless sensor networks: performance under realistic network conditions

Authors: Manikanden Balakrishnan; Driss Benhaddou; Xiaojing Yuan

Addresses: Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty, Klipsch School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM, USA. ' Department of Engineering Technology, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA. ' Department of Engineering Technology, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA

Abstract: The proliferation of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deployment in threat monitoring applications requires support for emergency-class services with tight Quality-of-Service (QoS) bounds. The CP-EDCA protocol was designed to achieve deterministic delay bounds for emergency-class traffic during distributed wireless network operation. The CP-EDCA scheme could be an ideal choice for prioritised channel access in WSNs, if the performance is demonstrated to be effective under WSN conditions. Here, we evaluate the effectiveness of CP-EDCA protocol under erroneous channel conditions and multi-hop data flow scenarios, which are distinctive features of WSNs. Mathematical and simulation analysis depicts that under typical WSN conditions, distributed preemptions accomplish deterministic delay bounds for emergency traffic even with heavy network loads. Under severe packet losses, CP-EDCA depicted perceivable improvements, relative to IEEE 802.11e standards. Analysis in multi-hop scenarios validates that the channel access preemptions have a significant impact on the end-to-end data flow performance.

Keywords: WSNs; wireless sensor networks; IEEE 802.11e standards; distributed MAC; medium access control; QoS; quality of service; threat monitoring; emergency services; emergency management; channel access prioritisation; emergency traffic; heavy network loads; data flow performance; disaster monitoring; emergency priority information.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2012.045959

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2012 Vol.11 No.2, pp.90 - 99

Received: 10 Nov 2010
Accepted: 15 Jul 2011
Published online: 23 Mar 2012 *

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