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