LLTP-QoS: Low latency traffic prioritization and QoS-aware routing in wireless body sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Body Sensor Network (WBSN) is deployed in delay-sensitive application scenarios where providing Quality-of-Service (QoS) is utmost important. The QoS-aware routing protocol not only discovers a route from source to destination but also satisfies QoS requirements in heavily loaded wireless networks. Emergency/critical data packets must reach the intended destination without incurring significant delays and fulfill multiconstrained demands (reliability, delay, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR)) of heterogeneous applications. Congestion occurs in heavy traffic situation when the incoming traffic load exceeds the capacity of transmission link, buffer overflows, packet collision, channel contention. Consequently, it impacts QoS in terms of packet loss, end-to-end delay and PDR. Moreover, the selection of poor links/routes may have detrimental impacts of the performance of WBSN and there can be significant variations in throughput, delay, network lifetime, route stability performance. Majority of the existing priority-aware routing protocols proposed for Medium Access Control (MAC) layer to solve the slot allocation problem by which data packets are classified into different categories. However, less attention has been given to traffic prioritization at network layer for data categorization. Furthermore, optimized traffic prioritization has been overlooked, thereby increases the data redundancy, queue/link delay, data loss and decreases the reliability of the network, and it does not satisfy the QoS requirements of WBSN and affects the critical data to be delivered in a less privileged manner. This work proposes the Low Latency Traffic Prioritization scheme for QoS-aware routing (LLTP-QoS). The LLTP-QoS is designed to enhance the transmission of critical data in a privileged manner (reliability) and avoids the end-to-end delay. The performance of proposed scheme is evaluated in terms of throughput, average end-to-end delay, PDR, normalized routing load, network lifetime through extensive simulations using Network Simulator-2 (NS2). The simulation results verified improved performance of proposed LLTP-QoS scheme as compared to existing routing protocols.