Reliable real-time data acquisition for rapidly deployable mission-critical wireless sensor networks

The nature of military operations introduces additional requirements on sensor and ad-hoc networks such as reliability and operating in real-time. Although there has been many techniques providing reliability and real-time data communication in the literature, their implementations challenge with resource limitations peculiar to Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Real-time data demand and reliability challenge with the objective of minimization of energy consumption. Moreover, most of these techniques require topological information of the deployed network which introduces communications and processing overhead. In this paper, we present an energy-efficient and reliable data acquisition approach for time-critical and real-time traffic in WSN applications. Real-time data is carried over multiple paths to provide reliability in communications. The proposed approach provides the ability to route data without topology information. Moreover no complex computations are required. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed technique fulfils the requirements of tactical communications of instantly deployable sensor networks in a hostile environment. Although the proposed method is developed for instantly deployable sensor and ad hoc networks such as those deployed in emergency cases, in hostile environment and, in dangerous environments, it can also be applicable for preconfigured networks.