POWER-SPEED: A Power-Controlled Real-Time Data Transport Protocol for Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks

This paper investigates the data transport problem for reporting delay-sensitive events in wireless sensor-actuator networks (WSANs). We specifically tailor the protocol design according to the features of WSANs and propose POWER-SPEED, a real-time data transport protocol for WSANs to achieve energy-efficient data transport for delay-sensitive event reporting. In POWER-SPEED, sensor nodes select the next-hop neighbor to actuators according to the spatio-temporal historic data of the upstream QoS condition, which completely avoids control packets. With an adaptive transmitter power control scheme, POWER-SPEED conveys packets in an energy-efficient manner while maintaining soft real-time packet transport. It thus reduces the energy consumption of data transport while ensuring the QoS requirement in timeliness domain. We demonstrate the effectiveness of POWER-SPEED through simulations with NS2.