Impact of queue buffer size awareness on single and multi service real-time routing protocols for WSNs

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are increasingly used and will certainly be part of our everyday lives. Many routing protocols were designed with respect to WSNs capacities to allow the achievement of numerous applications. One of the not well investigated areas in WSNs is the queue management issue. The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of the impact of queue buffer size awareness on the Quality of Service (QoS) of real-time (RT) routing protocols in WSNs. The studied protocols are SPEED and its extension Multipath Multi-speed (MMSPEED). SPEED protocol yields RT routing for only one class of traffic, by maintaining a desired packet’s progression speed (PS) across the WSN. On the other hand, MMSPEED protocol extends SPEED by offering multiple types of service to packets according to their class of traffic. The main contribution is that the routing decision is made on neighbors’ available queue buffer size at each level in addition to PS metric. Simulations have proved that the two metrics are compatible, the routing decision is efficient in case of single service protocol and multiservice one and improves two QoS domains namely timeliness and reliability.