Real-time communication in low-power mobile wireless networks

Real-time wireless communication infrastructure is increasingly deployed to support industrial and cyber-physical applications. A limitation of existing real-time protocols is that they do not support mobility. This paper presents the development of a real-time network composed of a multi-hop infrastructure, and mobile nodes that associate with infrastructure nodes as they move. Once a mobile node joined the network, its real-time communication is guaranteed irrespective to the number and mobility pattern of mobile nodes. To develop this network, we propose Mobility-Aware Scheduling Algorithm (MASA), which benefits from new transmission scheduling approaches that cleverly combine potential packet transmissions to increase real-time capacity. We have developed a realistic trace-based simulator to evaluate the performance of MASA against two baseline algorithms. Experimental results indicate that MASA increases the number of admitted mobile nodes by 7× and 1.6×, and extends the network lifetime by 110% and 30%, compared to the baselines.