Real-time data broadcast in K-covered wireless sensor networks

The K-coverage configuration in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is widely exploited to guarantee the quality of detecting critical events, such as enemy targets, forest fires, or toxic gases. In such applications, many urgent messages should be propagated to the whole network with time constraints. Although many previous studies effectively diminish the well-known broadcast storm problem, which causes lots of redundant packets and serious packet collisions, most of them deal with non realtime messages. For real-time data broadcast, extra requirements should be met, that is, timely delivery of packets with low jitter and high delivery ratio. We propose RTBK, which is a cross-layered approach on the K-covered WSNs to propagate urgent messages within predefined time constraints while preserving the detection quality. Experimental results showed that RTBK outperforms several algorithms in two major metrics (packet delivery ratio and packet delay) and has high scalability under a wide range of network conditions.