A Source Aware Scheduling Algorithm for Time-Optimal Convergecast

Most applications of industrial wireless sensor networks (IWSNs) should converge process data generated by each node to the central manager. The data collection operation results in an important communication primitive referred to as convergecast. Convergecast is a many-to-one communication paradigm as a critical functionality deployed for industrial monitoring and control. Delaying of process data may degrade the overall control performance and even lead to the malfunction of industrial applications. Therefore, timeslot and channel resources should be scheduled efficiently for real-time communication. This paper is interested in determining a TDMA schedule that minimizes the number of timeslots and completes convergecast with a limited number of channels. In order to achieve the lower bound derived by theoretical analysis, we proposed a source aware scheduling algorithm for general network. For IWSNs with a fixed number of available channels, we present a source aware scheduling algorithm with constrained channel. According to simulation results, we demonstrate that the performance of our algorithm is close to the lower bound on latency with a limited number of channels. Our algorithm is also scalable for schedules with multiple packets and specific transmission latency of a single packet.