Cross-Layer Admission Control to Enhance the Support of Real-Time Applications in WSN

摘要

Real-time monitoring applications may be used ina wireless sensor network (WSN) and may generate packet flowswith strict quality of service requirements in terms of delay,jitter, or packet loss. When strict delays are imposed from sourceto destination, the packets must be delivered at the destinationwithin an end-to-end delay (EED) hard limit in order to beconsidered useful. Since the WSN nodes are scarce both inprocessing and energy resources, it is desirable that they onlytransport useful data, as this contributes to enhance the overallnetwork performance and to improve energy efficiency. In thispaper, we propose a novel cross-layer admission control (CLAC)mechanism to enhance the network performance and increaseenergy efficiency of a WSN, by avoiding the transmission ofpotentially useless packets. The CLAC mechanism uses anestimation technique to preview packets EED, and decides toforward a packet only if it is expected to meet the EED deadlinedefined by the application, dropping it otherwise. The resultsobtained show that CLAC enhances the network performanceby increasing the useful packet delivery ratio in high networkloads and improves the energy efficiency in every network load.