An efficient priority packet scheduling algorithm for Wireless Sensor Network

Scheduling real-time and non-real time packets at the sensor nodes is significantly important to reduce processing overhead, energy consumptions, communications bandwidth, and end-to-end data transmission delay of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Most of the existing packet scheduling algorithms of WSN use assignments based on First-Come First-Served (FCFS), non-preemptive priority, and preemptive priority scheduling. However, these algorithms incur a large processing overhead and data transmission delay and are not dynamic to the data traffic changes. In this paper, we propose three-class priority packet scheduling scheme. Emergency real-time packets are placed into the highest priority queue and can preempt the processing of packets at other queues. Other packets are prioritized based on the location of sensor nodes and are placed into two other queues. Lowest priority packets can preempt the processing of their immediate higher priority packets after waiting for a certain number of timeslots. Simulation results show that the proposed three-class priority packet scheduling scheme outperforms FCFS and multi-level queue schedulers in terms of end-to-end data transmission delay.