Consistent Message Ordering in Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) have attracted much attention in the recent years. In WSANs, sensor nodes are in charge of the sensing task, while the actor nodes take actions in response to the sensed phenomena or the detected event. In order to execute the correct operations, the applications typically have to process the data or messages from the different sensors in the same order. This paper presents a Consistent Message Ordering (CMO) algorithm, which ensures that messages from the different sensors arrive at the different actors in a consistent order. The significance of the algorithm is fully localized, asynchronous and energy-efficient. We prove the correctness of the algorithm, and analyze the theoretical message complexity. And the experimental results show that CMO algorithm improves the performance at least 60% over TMOS algorithm in many situations.