Clustering Scheme for (m,k)-Firm Streams in Wireless Sensor Networks

As good example of potential application-specific requirement, (m,k)-firm real-time streams have been recently introduced to deliver multimedia data efficiently in wireless sensor networks. In addition to stream model, communication protocols to meet specific (m,k)-firm real-time streams have been newly developed or extended from existing protocols. However, since the existing schemes for an (m,k)-firm stream have been proposed under typical flat architecture, the scalability problem remains unsolved when the number of real-time flows increases in the networks. To solve this problem, in this paper, we propose a new clustering scheme for an (m,k)-firm stream. The two different clustering algorithms are performed according to either the (m,k)-firm requirement or the deadline. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the suitability of the proposed scheme under hierarchical architecture by showing that its performance is acceptable irrespective of the increase in the number of flows.