A novel real-time scheme for (m,k)-firm streams in wireless sensor networks

The multimedia transmission based real-time applications have posed a big challenge to wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where both reliability and timeliness need to be guaranteed at the same time, to support an acceptable Quality of Service (QoS). The existing real-time routing protocols, however, are not able to meet the QoS requirements of realtime applications because of the inherent resource constraint of sensor nodes and instability of wireless communication. Therefore, we propose a real-time scheme in this paper, including a QoS-aware routing protocol and a set of fault recovery mechanisms, for (m,k)-firm based real-time applications over WSNs. A local status indicator which is specially devised for (m,k)-firm stream, is used for intermediate nodes to monitor and evaluate their local conditions. The proposed routing protocol takes into account of packet deadline, node condition and remaining energy of next hop, to make optimal forwarding decision. Additionally, according to the stream QoS and node condition, the proposed fault recovery mechanisms are utilized for nodes to handle the congestion, link failure and void problems occurred during transmission and remain the desired reliability and timeliness requirements. The proposed scheme has been well studied and verified through simulations. The results have proved the efficiency of the proposed scheme in terms of high successful transmission ratio, small end-to-end delay and long lifetime of network.