QoS and energy aware routing for real-time traffic in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks are being built to facilitate automated information gathering in military, industrial, environmental and surveillance applications. Many such applications of Sensor Networks require improved QoS (packet delivery within a defined deadline) guarantees as well as high reliability. These applications demand high packet delivery ratio and are extremely delay-sensitive. However, certain factors limit the ability of the multihop sensor network to achieve the desired goals. These factors include the delay caused by network congestion, hot regions in the network, limited energy of the sensor nodes, packet loss due to collisions and link failure. In this paper, we propose an energy aware dual-path routing scheme for real-time traffic, which balances node energy utilization to increase the network lifetime, takes network congestion into account to reduce the routing delay across the network and increases the reliability of the packets reaching the destination by introducing minimal data redundancy. This paper also introduces an adaptive prioritized Medium Access Layer (MAC) to provide a differentiated service model for real-time packets. Our claims are well supported by simulation results.