A Dynamic Packet Scheduling Scheme with Multilevel Priority for Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Packet scheduling is one of the critical issues in wireless sensor networks. In WSNs most existing scheduling mechanisms use FCFS, non-preemptive or preemptive priority algorithms. However, most of these algorithms incur high processing overhead and high end-to-end transmission delay due to the FCFS concept and starvation of real time and nonreal time data packets in non-preemptive and preemptive priority scheduling algorithms. Also, these packet scheduling algorithms are predetermined and hence cannot change in application requirements of WSNs. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a dynamic multilevel priority (DMP) packet scheduling algorithm to overcome the short comes like starvation of real time data, end-to-end or data transmission delay, and to make the packet scheduling dynamic. It is well known that in DMP scheduling scheme, nodes are organized in hierarchical structure and each node (except those nodes which are located at last level of hierarchical structure) has three level of priority queues in which real time data packets go to highest priority queue and non-real time data packets go to other two queues based on certain threshold levels of their estimated processing time. The DMP scheme proposed in this work was implemented with network simulator (NS2) v.2.32. The results obtained (end-to-end delay, average waiting time, network lifetime, and energy consumption) indicate the proposed DMP scheme is superior to existing first come first serve (FCFS) packet scheduling scheme. General Terms Wireless Sensor Network, FCFS.