A traffic adaptive inter-cluster head delay control scheme in WSNs

In critical infrastructure monitoring applications, the packet arrival rates of a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) may abruptly increase when cascaded failures are observed in the monitored environment. WSNs with cluster-tree topologies could experience excessive delays because of this increase in packet arrival rates. Therefore, there should be an optimum operating point in the network where the network could accommodate high packet arrival rates with low latency. In this paper, we propose an adaptive scheme that can achieve low latency while maintaining high reliability values in cluster-tree based WSNs. Furthermore, our scheme provides Quality of Service (QoS) differentiation to high priority data. Analytical and simulation results show that our scheme significantly reduces the delay while maintaining high reliability and energy efficiency values.