Quality of Service Aware Route Discovery for Wireless Sensor Networks

Traditional wireless sensor networks operate using best-effort regardless of what type of traffic is being transmitted between source and destination. Due to assumed redundancy of sensor data, this method of transmission is considered to be sufficient for transmission of data used in environment monitoring, surveillance, or location- aware applications. Reliability or delay concerns were considered to be general properties of the network and solved regardless of what traffic is being transmitted. Current developments creates the possibly of heterogeneous traffic, that is data which has different priorities of transmission. This introduces the possibility of including quality of service (QoS) parameters in decision making and transmission of data from sensor. This paper explores the idea of incorporating QoS parameters in making routing decisions with concerns on power, reliability and delay. An optimization problem is formulated to determine the optimum data transmission rate with constraints on power, reliability and delay