Providing Alarm Delivery Guarantees in High-rate Industrial Wireless Sensor Network Deployments

We are witnessing a large increase of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) deployments, used to sense, monitor and act on the environment, because cable-free solutions are easier to deploy. However, in industrial applications, WSNs still aren’t seen as a viable option because of the required fast sampling rates and the reduced time delay, particularly in a multi-hop deployment where traffic congestion may occur. Message losses are unacceptable, particularly in what concerns critical messages containing actuation instructions or other urgent data, which may have time-constraint requirements that cannot be guaranteed. Our research focuses on integrating traffic-aware data processing strategies and network traffic prioritization to overcome congestion states, in order to guarantee that urgent alarms and commands are enacted in time. Traffic is divided into urgent messages (alarms and actuation commands), that have time-delivery requirements; and the remaining periodic sensed data. In this paper we propose an integrated approach NetDP, which applies adaptable data processing strategies (DP) and traffic reduction (DP-Manager) policies to ensure that application requirements are satisfied with minimal message losses, while simultaneously guaranteeing timely delivery of alarms. We demonstrate that NETDP solution with different data processing strategies and levels of system stress can efficiently guarantee the timely delivery of alarms and actuation messages.