Mission-critical applications are potential future applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). These applications require that data delivery must be timely, reliable and energy-efficient. Most existing WSNs cannot support this mission-critical data delivery as they focus solely on the energy efficiency. A few recent studies improve data delivery performance but still fail to give strict performance guarantees. This thesis closes the outlined research gap by proposing novel solutions for timely, reliable and energy efficient data transport. The required performance is achieved by employing a tailor-made TDMA-based medium access control (MAC) protocol at the core of the wireless sensor network. In addition, two fundamentally different approaches for constructing such MAC protocols have been developed. The first approach called node-to-node framework employs a MAC protocol that provides timely data delivery between neighboring nodes and is used in conjunction with an analytical tool, called Sensor Network Calculus (SNC), to determine and ensure the maximum delivery time. The second approach called end-to-end framework uses a MAC protocol with a network-wide transmission schedule to calculate and guarantee the maximum delivery time. Both frameworks also utilize reliability control schemes and energy saving mechanisms to achieve the overall performance goal. This thesis details the design, implementation and evaluation of both frameworks. The evaluation results clearly demonstrate that the frameworks outperform existing approaches and efficiently enable the support of mission-critical applications. These results therefore emphasize that the presented research is necessary to overcome limitations of current WSNs. Furthermore, this thesis presents a performance comparison between the frameworks in order to gain knowledge of their relative merits and limitations. An insightful guideline for selecting a suitable framework to best serve a given deployment scenario is consequently provided.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:618818 |
| Date | January 2011 |
| Creators | Suriyachai, Petcharat |
| Publisher | Lancaster University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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