MAC-aware Delay Optimization for Wireless Sensor Network Gateway with a Microcontroller

Wireless sensor network devices are widely used for home automation and monitoring services. With low power consumption and low cost, IEEE 802.15.4 is highly attractive and accepted as the de facto standard wireless sensor networks. In order to benefit from the low cost similar chips are used also for the gateway. However, as the gateway has to forward all the accumulated packets this poses a resource sharing problem for the microcontroller between wireless tasks and forwarding tasks. In this work, we show this bottleneck with measurements. Then, we formulate the resource sharing as an optimization problem and solve it with an algorithm that has low complexity, fit for a microcontroller. Finally, we validate the analytical optimization with measurement and simulations. This simple optimization can result in a reduction of delay at level of seconds.     «

Wireless sensor network devices are widely used for home automation and monitoring services. With low power consumption and low cost, IEEE 802.15.4 is highly attractive and accepted as the de facto standard wireless sensor networks. In order to benefit from the low cost similar chips are used also for the gateway. However, as the gateway has to forward all the accumulated packets this poses a resource sharing problem for the microcontroller between wireless tasks and forwarding tasks. In this wo...     »