Scheduling communication in real-time sensor applications

Abstract

We consider a class of wireless sensor applications - such as mobile robotics - that impose timeliness constraints. We assume that these applications are built using commodity 802.11 wireless networks and focus on the problem of providing qualitatively-better QoS during network transmission of sensor data. Our techniques are designed to explicitly avoid network collisions and minimize the completion time to transmit a set of sensor messages. We argue that this problem is NP-complete and present three heuristics, based on edge coloring, to achieve these goals. Our simulations results show that the minimum weight color heuristic is robust to increases in communication density and yields results that are close to the optimal solution.