Extension of ReInForM Protocol for (m,k)-firm Real-time Streams in Wireless Sensor Networks

For real-time wireless sensor network applications, it is essential to provide different levels of quality of service (QoS) such as reliability, low latency, and fault-tolerant traffic control. To meet these requirements, an (m,k)-firm based real-time routing protocol has been proposed in our prior work, including a novel local transmission status indicator called local DBP (L_DBP). In this paper, a fault recovery scheme for (m,k)-firm real-time streams is proposed to improve the performance of our prior work, by contributing a delay-aware forwarding candidates selection algorithm for providing restricted redundancy of packets on multipath with bounded delay in case of transmission failure. Each node can utilize the evaluated stream DBP (G_DBP) and L_DBP values as well as the deadline information of packets to dynamically define the forwarding candidate set. Simulation results show that for real-time service, it is possible to achieve both reliability and timeliness in the fault recovery process, which consequently avoids dynamic failure and guarantees meeting the end-to-end QoS requirement.