Reliability-latency tradeoffs for data gathering in random-access wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Gathering sensor data at high reliability and low latency is one of the key design challenges for wireless sensor networks(WSNs). In this paper, we explore the reliability-latency tradeoffs for data gathering in random-access multi-hop wireless sensor networks. We introduce a model considering both packet delivery reliability and latency for the objective to construct an optimal data gathering tree, which can minimize the packet delivery latency for each node while providing guaranteed per-link packet successful delivery probability. We formulate this problem as an optimization problem and propose a sink targeted shortest path algorithm(STSPA). The solution for calculating optimal channel access parameters is also presented. We evaluate the performance of our model by extensive simulations, and results show that our model can provide good tradeoffs between reliability and latency. Furthermore, our model is robust to environmental interference.