QoS for Wireless Sensor Networks: Service Differentiation at the MAC Sub-Layer

Providing service differentiation in wireless sensor networks while proposing simple and highly scalable solution is a challenging problem. We retain the use of CSMA/CA as access protocol because of its simplicity, versatility and good scalability properties. We developed CoSenS on the top of it to address its weaknesses while facilitating the implementation of scheduling policies. In this article, we propose a simple and scalable service differentiation solution; we implement fixed priority and earliest deadline first on the top of CoSenS. The simulation analysis shows that our solution greatly enhances end-to-end delay, reliability and deadline meet ratio for urgent traffic while not degrading best effort traffic compared to IEEE 802.15.4 original protocol and IEEE 802.15.4 implementing these scheduling policies.