Pbqm: a Priority-Based Queue Management Method for Wireless Sensor Networks

Event detection is important in many sensor network applications. Traffic in these applications exhibits a many-to-one pattern, in which multiple source nodes send sensing data to a single sink node. Since bandwidth and storage capacity is highly constrained in sensor networks, packet loss is inevitable when a great deal of traffic rushes to sink. Based on the observation that the packets are not equal in the serving of event detection, we propose to employ priority-based queue management method (PBQM) to improve packet delivery ratio of more important packets. We put forward three priority mapping schemes and evaluate the performance of PBQM method by simulation with Ns-2.