Proposition and Simulation of a Network Layer based Hard Real Time Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Several wireless sensor network applications are emerging in areas ranging from defense, security, to health or smart homes. Their goal is often to monitor a geographic area and when a sensor detects a feared event, it informs the sink using an alarm message. When such an event happens, the application needs to react with finite bounded and known delays, which are hard real-time constraints. To our knowledge only few works on communication protocols deal with such constraints. Our work deals with routing based 2-dimensional network topologies and event based alarm messages being delivered in real time at the destination or sink node. This work proposes and simulates a new network layer based hard real time protocol, which assumes a collision free known delay MAC (medium access control) layer.