JiTS: Just-in-Time Scheduling for Real-Time Sensor Data Dissemination

We consider the problem of real-time data dissemination in wireless sensor networks, in which data are associated with deadlines and it is desired for data to reach the sink(s) by their deadlines. To this end, existing real-time data dissemination work have developed packet scheduling schemes that prioritize packets according to their deadlines. In this paper, we first demonstrate that not only the scheduling discipline but also the routing protocol has a significant impact on the success of real-time sensor data dissemination. We show that the shortest path routing using the minimum number of hops leads to considerably better performance than Geographical Forwarding, which has often been used in existing real-time data dissemination work. We also observe that packet prioritization by itself is not enough for real-time data dissemination, since many high priority packets may simultaneously contend for network resources, deteriorating the network performance. Instead, real-time packets could be judiciously delayed to avoid severe contention as long as their deadlines can be met. Based on this observation, we propose a Just-in-Time Scheduling (JiTS) algorithm for scheduling data transmissions to alleviate the shortcomings of the existing solutions. We explore several policies for non-uniformly delaying data at different intermediate nodes to account for the higher expected contention as the packet gets closer to the sink(s). By an extensive simulation study, we demonstrate that JiTS can significantly improve the deadline miss ratio and packet drop ratio compared to existing approaches in various situations. Notably, JiTS improves the performance requiring neither lower layer support nor synchronization among the sensor nodes

Hierarchical routing protocols for wireless sensor network: a compressive survey

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are one of the key enabling technologies for the Internet of Things (IoT). WSNs play a major role in data communications in applications such as home, health care, environmental monitoring, smart grids, and transportation. WSNs are used in IoT applications and should be secured and energy efficient in order to provide highly reliable data communications. Because of the constraints of energy, memory and computational power of the WSN nodes, clustering algorithms are considered as energy efficient approaches for resource-constrained WSNs. In this paper, we present a survey of the state-of-the-art routing techniques in WSNs. We first present the most relevant previous work in routing protocols surveys then highlight our contribution. Next, we outline the background, robustness criteria, and constraints of WSNs. This is followed by a survey of different WSN routing techniques. Routing techniques are generally classified as flat, hierarchical, and location-based routing. This survey focuses on the deep analysis of WSN hierarchical routing protocols. We further classify hierarchical protocols based on their routing techniques. We carefully choose the most relevant state-of-the-art protocols in order to compare and highlight the advantages, disadvantage and performance issues of each routing technique. Finally, we conclude this survey by presenting a comprehensive survey of the recent improvements of Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) routing protocols and a comparison of the different versions presented in the literature

Atomic-SDN: Is Synchronous Flooding the Solution to Software-Defined Networking in IoT?

The adoption of Software Defined Networking (SDN) within traditional networks has provided operators the ability to manage diverse resources and easily reconfigure networks as requirements change. Recent research has extended this concept to IEEE 802.15.4 low-power wireless networks, which form a key component of the Internet of Things (IoT). However, the multiple traffic patterns necessary for SDN control makes it difficult to apply this approach to these highly challenging environments. This paper presents Atomic-SDN, a highly reliable and low-latency solution for SDN in low-power wireless. Atomic-SDN introduces a novel Synchronous Flooding (SF) architecture capable of dynamically configuring SF protocols to satisfy complex SDN control requirements, and draws from the authors' previous experiences in the IEEE EWSN Dependability Competition: where SF solutions have consistently outperformed other entries. Using this approach, Atomic-SDN presents considerable performance gains over other SDN implementations for low-power IoT networks. We evaluate Atomic-SDN through simulation and experimentation, and show how utilizing SF techniques provides latency and reliability guarantees to SDN control operations as the local mesh scales. We compare Atomic-SDN against other SDN implementations based on the IEEE 802.15.4 network stack, and establish that Atomic-SDN improves SDN control by orders-of-magnitude across latency, reliability, and energy-efficiency metrics