A Priority-based Packet Scheduling Method in Wireless Sensor Networks

Event detection is important in many sensor network applications. Traffic in event detection exhibits a many-to-one pattern, in which multiple source nodes send sensing data to a single sink node. Since bandwidth and storage capacity is highly constrained in sensor networks, packet loss is inevitable when a great deal of traffic rushes to sink. Based on the observation that all packets are not equal in the serving of event detection, we propose to employ priority-based scheduling to improve packet delivery ratio of more important packets. We put forward three priority mapping schemes and evaluate the performance of priority-based scheduling by simulation with Ns-2.