Interference-Aware Real-Time Flow Scheduling for Wireless Sensor Networks

With the emergence of wireless sensor networks, an enabling communication technology for distributed real-time systems, the authors face the critical challenge of meeting the end-to-end deadlines of real-time flows. This paper presents Real-time Flow Scheduling (RFS), a novel conflict-free real-time transmission scheduling approach for periodic real-time flows in wireless sensor networks. In contrast to existing transmission scheduling algorithms that ignore interference between transmissions or prevent spatial reuse within the same channel, RFS supports spatial reuse through a novel interference-aware transmission scheduling. While recent work on conflict-free transmission scheduling focused on specialized communication patterns such as queries and converge cast, RFS is designed for peer-to-peer real-time flows with arbitrary inter-flow interference.