Adjusting Transmission Power for Real-Time Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks

As the new requirements for wireless sensor networks are emerging, real-time communications is becoming a major research challenge because resource-constrained sensor nodes are not powerful enough to accommodate the complexity of the protocol. In addition, an efficient energy management scheme has naturally been a concern in wireless sensor networks for a long time. However, the existing schemes are limited to meeting one of these two requirements. To address the two factors together, we propose real-time communications with two approaches, a protocol for satisfied conditions and one for unsatisfied. Under the satisfied requirement, existing real-time protocol is employed. On the other hand, for the unsatisfied requirement, the newly developed scheme replaces the existing scheme by adjusting the transmission range of some surplus nodes. By expanding the transmission range, the end-to-end delay is shortened because the number of intermediate nodes decreases. These nodes conserve their energy for real-time communications by avoiding other activities such as sensing, forwarding, and computing. Finally, simulation results are given to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme in high traffic environments.