Analysing qos trade-offs in wireless sensor networks

ABSTRACT

Quality of Service (QoS) support for wireless sensor networks (WSN) is a fairly new topic that is gaining more and more interest. This paper introduces a method for configuring the nodes of a WSN such that application-level QoS constraints are met. This is a complex task, since the search space is typically extremely large. The method is based on a recent algebraic approach to Pareto analysis, that we use to reason about QoS trade-offs. It features an algorithm that keeps the working set of possible configurations small, by analysing parts of the network in a hierarchical fashion, and meanwhile discarding configurations that are inferior to other configurations. Furthermore, we give WSN models for two different applications, in which QoS trade-offs are made explicit. Test results show that the models are accurate and that the method is scalable and thus practically usable for WSN, even with large numbers of nodes.

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Index Terms

• Computer systems organization

  • Architectures

    • Distributed architectures

• Computing methodologies

  • Modeling and simulation

    • Model development and analysis

      • Modeling methodologies

• Software and its engineering

  • Software organization and properties

    • Software system structures

      • Distributed systems organizing principles