On the Deadline Miss Probability of Various Routing Policies in Wireless Sensor Networks

Moving data across communication networks is often subject to deadline requirements. An example is early warning of disasters of natural origin, where sensor measurements at the disaster location must be communicated across a network within a predefined maximum delay in order for a consequent warning to be timely. In this work, we present a probabilistic model that allows for characterizing the delay experienced by sensor measurements in a wireless sensor network from source to sink depending upon the routing metric used for forwarding the data through the network. Using link delay probability distributions and the probabilities of following different paths to the sink, source-to-sink delay distributions are found for routing policies based on minimum hop-count, minimum mean delay and the Joint Latency (JLAT) protocol. An algorithm for calculating the end-to-end source to sink delay probability density function (PDF) is presented for the general case of networks that use routing tables whose input for routing decisions is the remaining time-to-deadline. The work provides a general tool for routing delay analysis, allowing for comparison of the deadline miss probability between different routing policies. An improved form of JLAT is proposed. Its deadline miss probability is found using the presented algorithm and compared to the ones determined for minimum hop-count, minimum mean delay and JLAT by means of an example.