Priority interrupts of duty cycled communications in wireless sensor networks

FrameComm is a contention based, Duty Cycled, MAC protocol that ensures a message will be transmitted during the receiver's listen phase by sending a packet, followed by a short gap, repeatedly for a precalculated number of times or until an acknowledgment is received. While introducing duty cycled communications can yield large power savings it does so at the cost of increased delay and decreased throughput. Many WSNs may incorporate several distinct message types of varying priority. A node with a high priority message to send may find the channel to be busy with a lesser priority message from another node and must therefore 'back-off' leading to further delays. In a multi-hop environment, these delays are compounded and may become unacceptably large. This paper proposes adding a high priority interrupt message to FrameComm that allows a node with important data to send to interrupt another node's lesser priority transmission giving immediate access to the channel. The priority interrupt mechanism is evaluated using an implementation in TinyOS 2 on a small laboratory testbed.