RTXP: A Localized Real-Time MAC-Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

International audienceProtocols developed during the last years for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are mainly focused on energy efficiency and autonomous mecha- nisms (e.g. self-organization, self-configuration, etc). Nevertheless, with new WSN applications, new QoS requirements appear, such as time constraints. Real-time applications require the packets to be delivered before a known time bound which depends on the application requirements. We particularly focus on applications which consist in alarms sent to the sink node. We pro- pose Real-Time X-layer Protocol (RTXP), a real-time communication pro- tocol. RTXP is a MAC and routing real-time communication protocol that is not centralized, but instead relies only on local information. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first real-time protocol for WSNs using an op- portunistic routing scheme in order to increase the packet delivery ratio. In this paper we describe the protocol mechanisms. We give theoretical bounds on the end-to-end delay and the capacity of the protocol. Intensive simula- tion results confirm the theoretical predictions and allow to compare RTXP with a real-time scheduled solution. RTXP is also simulated under harsh radio channel, in this case, the radio link introduces probabilistic behavior. Nevertheless, we show that RTXP performs better than a non-deterministic solution. It thus advocates for the usefulness of designing real-time (deter- ministic) protocols even for highly unreliable networks such as WSNs