Proposal of an Assured Corridor Mechanism for Urgent Information Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are expected to play an essential role as a social infrastructure to realize the people safe and secure living environment. In such a network, critical information must be transmitted faster and more reliably than other information. The authors propose a distributed transmission mechanism which enables emergency packets to be carried with high reliability and low latency along a preferential path, which is called an "Assured corridor." In this self-organizing Assured Corridor Mechanism (ACM), which works above the network layer and does not depend on any specific routing or MAC protocol, a corridor is gradually established as the first packet containing urgent information propagates to the base station.