Internet of things applications require lower and lower delay to enable different applications such as healthcare monitoring. Most of the prior work focuses on enabling this through upcoming and expensive 5G communications. Another alternative to realize a solution is the ever-existing wireless sensor networks. The real-time communication through sensors has been of interest for industrial applications and is currently available for scales down to 100 ms. When we are interested in delays of two orders of magnitude lower, low processing power of sensors and internal hardware delay becomes significant. In this work we analyse existing sensor networks for mostly neglected delay contributors in a real testbed. We demonstrate that even the existing and cheap hardware can potentially meet the real-time requirements. These results are further utilized to provide discussions for an optimized medium access control delay.
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