Design and evaluation of a wireless sensor network architecture for urgent information transmission

Urgent sensor information such as a fire alarm must be transmitted as fast and reliably as possible in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) as a social infrastructure. Therefore, a WSN is required to be capable of prioritising transmission of urgent information over other non-urgent information. In this paper, we design an architecture for fast and reliable transmission of urgent information in a WSN. Sensor information is classified into three traffic classes: critical, important and normal. To adapt to the scale of an emergency, we integrate several simple mechanisms which cooperate with each other depending on the size and duration of the emergency. Each node operates in a fully distributed and autonomous fashion by reacting to locally observed events. Through simulation experiments of various scenarios, we show that the architecture successfully improves the delivery ratio and the delay of urgent sensor information.