Analysis of EDF scheduling for Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks

Industry is adopting Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks (WSANs) as the communication infrastructure for process control applications. To meet the stringent real-time performance requirements of control systems, there is a critical need for fast end-to-end delay analysis for real-time flows that can be used for online admission control. This paper presents a new end-to-end delay analysis for periodic flows whose transmissions are scheduled based on the Earliest Deadline First (EDF) policy. Our analysis comprises novel techniques to bound the communication delays caused by channel contention and transmission conflicts in a WSAN. Furthermore, we propose a technique to reduce the pessimism in admission control by iteratively tightening the delay bounds for flows with short deadlines. Experiments on a WSAN testbed and simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our analysis for online admission control of real-time flows.