Handling Inelastic Traffic in Wireless Sensor Networks

The capabilities of sensor networking devices are increasing at a rapid pace. It is therefore not impractical to assume that future sensing operations will involve real time (inelastic) traffic, such as audio and video surveillance, which have strict bandwidth constraints. This in turn implies that future sensor networks will have to cater for a mix of elastic (having no bandwidth constraint requirements) and inelastic traffic. Current state of the art rate control protocols for wireless sensor networks, are however designed with focus on elastic traffic.