Towards Wireless Communication with Bounded Delay

Abstract

Many of the existing implementations of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) cannot be considered for safety critical systems that require a constant upper bound time delay delivering messages. To deal with that, Petig, Schiller, Tsigas proposed a selfstabilising Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) Protocol without leaders and external references [1]. The system settings that Petig et. al’s assume consider the case in which ambient noise does not exist and in the absence of concurrent transmission packets are always received. This work considers the implementation of Petig et. al in real systems. Namely, we consider message reception behaviour that is subject to ambient noise and other complex radio propagation patterns. We show that the strategy proposed by Petig et. al for mitigating the effect of concurrent transmissions is applicable for working WSN systems. We also propose to build atop Petig et. al’s robust algorithm and use a masking technique we call link reliability to provide mitigation against repeated packet drop due. Simulations and real experiments show distinct benefits of utilising link reliability.