This research proposes a novel minimal-overlap centrality-driven gateway designation method for real-time wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The goal is to enhance network schedulability by design, particularly, by exploiting the relationship between path node-overlaps and gateway designation. To this aim, we define a new metric termed minimal-overlap network centrality which characterizes the overall overlapping degree between all the active flows in the network when a given node is selected as gateway. The metric is then used to designate as gateway the node which produces the least overall number of path overlaps. For the purposes of evaluation, we assume a time-synchronized channel-hopping (TSCH) WSN under centralized earliest-deadline-first (EDF) scheduling and shortest-path routing. The assessment of the WSN traffic schedulability suggests our approach is dominant over classical network centrality metrics, namely, eigenvector, closeness, betweenness, and degree. Notably, it achieves up to 50% better schedulability than a degree centrality benchmark.This work was partially supported by National Funds
through FCT/MCTES (Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology), within the CISTER Research Unit
(UIDB/04234/2020); by the Operational Competitiveness Programme and Internationalization (COMPETE 2020) under the
PT2020 Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF); also by FCT and the ESF (European
Social Fund) through the Regional Operational Programme
(ROP) Norte 2020, under PhD grant 2020.06685.BDN/
