Utilizing a Perceptive Technique for the Delay-Sensitive Scheduling in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

CSMA/CA is a well known medium access mechanism extensively used in wireless networks. By detecting the carrier sensing (CS) signal, nodes determine whether the status of the wireless medium is busy or idle. However, recent works have shown that besides detecting the channel status, these signals can be used to derive the transmitted packet size at the nodes in the CS range. In this paper, we present the feasibility of this technique using CC2420 radio. In addition, we show how we can apply larger CS range and packet size detection to solve well-known problems such as reducing latency in the wireless sensor network (WSN). To our knowledge, the proposed solution is the first trial that applies such techniques to design the delay-sensitive scheduling for WSN. Based on our ns-2 simulation, we show that our proposal reduces latency significantly compared to the existing listen/sleep scheduling based protocols.