On real-time capacity limits of multihop wireless sensor networks

Multihop wireless sensor networks have recently emerged as an important embedded computing platform. This paper defines a quantitative notion of real-time capacity of a wireless network. Real-time capacity describes how much real-time data the network can transfer by their deadlines. A capacity bound is derived that can be used as a sufficient schedulability condition for a class of fixed-priority packet scheduling algorithms. Using this bound, a designer can perform capacity planning prior to network deployment to ensure satisfaction of applications' real-time requirements.