Energy-aware QoS provisioning for wireless sensor networks: Analysis and protocol

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are envisioned to facilitate information gathering for various applications and depending on the application types they may require certain quality of service (QoS) guarantee for successful and guaranteed event perception. Therefore, QoS in WSNs is an important issue and two most important parameters that hinder the goal of guaranteed event perception are time-sensitive and reliable delivery of gathered information, while a minimum energy consumption is desired. In this paper, we propose an energy-aware, multi-constrained and multi-path QoS provisioning mechanism for WSNs based on optimization approach. Hence, a detailed analytical analysis of reliability, delay and energy consumption is presented to formulate the optimization problem in an analytical way. A greedy algorithm is proposed to achieve the desired QoS guarantee while keeping the energy consumption minimum. Also, a simple but efficient retransmission mechanism is proposed to enhance the reliability further, while keeping the delay within delay bound. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme.