Quality of service control in proactive wireless sensor networks via lifetime planning

摘要

Successful exploitation of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) depends intuitively on the enabling technologies as well as the provision of application-level quality of service (QoS). Current research mostly focuses on maximising the network lifetime without considering the predefined task time. In this paper, we firstly provide a survey of QoS control approaches for WSNs. Subsequently, we propose a novel QoS control method, referred to as lifetime planning. Based on the design-time knowledge, lifetime planning provides users/applications with best effort QoS, while meeting the required time to complete the assigned task. To this end, an 'upper' and a 'lower' QoS boundary have to be defined for each metric at design-time. During run-time, a self-adaptation framework confines the metrics between these boundaries. We then consider an office monitoring scenario with a cluster-tree topology for performance evaluation. Simulation results in Contiki OS show that lifetime planning tremendously improves the performance while meeting the required lifetime.