Towards cluster-based real-time flow scheduling in interference-aware wireless sensor networks

As wireless sensor networks have been used in various fields, real-time applications are also run in sensor networks, such as real-time data aggregation or periodic image transmissions. In order to guarantee real-time flow deadlines, TDMA scheduling schemes can be applied with consideration of both node interference and flow deadlines. Generally, they require much time complexity as the number of sensor nodes and real-time flows increases in the networks. Thus, in this paper, we provide a cluster-based real-time flow scheduling scheme for the purpose of interference-aware real-time flow scheduling in wireless sensor networks. The proposed scheme includes (i) the intra-cluster scheduling which schedules real-time flows among nodes in each cluster, and (ii) the inter-cluster scheduling which schedules composed real-time flows among clusters. Throughout simulation results, we show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in many aspects.