Packet Priority Scheduling for Data Delivery Based on Multipath Routing in Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a collection of sensor nodes with limited power supply and limited transmission capability. Forwarding of data packets takes place in multi-hop data transmission through several possible paths. This paper presents a packet priority scheduling for data delivery in multipath routing, which utilizes the notion of service differentiation to permit urgent traffic to arrive in the sink node in a suitable delay, and decreases the end-to-end delay through the distribution of the traffic over several paths. During the construction path phase, from the sink node to the source node, the packet priority scheduling multipath routing (PPSMR) utilizes the remaining energy, node available buffer size, packet reception ratio, number of hops, and delay to select the best next hop. Furthermore, it adopts packet priority and data forwarding decision, which categorizes the packets to four classes founded on reliability and real-time necessities, and allows the source node to make data forwarding decision depending on the priority of the data packet and the path classifier to select the suitable path. Results show that PPSMR achieves lower average delay, low average energy consumption, and high packet delivery ratio than the EQSR routing.