A Preemptive Priority-Based Data Fragmentation Scheme for Heterogeneous Traffic in Wireless Sensor Networks

Prioritizing the heterogeneous traffic for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) imposes an important performance challenge for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Most past preemptive MAC schemes are based on scheduling the high priority packets earlier than those of lower priority. However, in a majority of these schemes, high priority traffic must wait for the ongoing transmission of lower priority traffic due to the non-availability of an interruption mechanism. This paper presents the design and high-level implementation details of a fragmentation scheme (FROG-MAC) for heterogeneous traffic in WSN. FROG-MAC aims at guaranteeing quick transmission of high priority/emergency traffic by interrupting ongoing on channel transmissions. High level implementation of FROG-MAC has been developed in MATLAB as a proof of concept. Traffic of two priorities was generated and a single hop star topology of 100 nodes was used for the experiments. Effect of the proposed fragmentation scheme has been evaluated on delay and Packet Drop Ratio (PDR) for both traffic types, by varying the packet size and fragment size. Simulation results have suggested that with the increasing packet size, the delay and PDR increase for both traffic types. When fragmentation was applied, the performance of high priority traffic significantly improved as compared to the low priority for both the parameters, delay and PDR. Furthermore, it has been found that decreasing the fragment size for low priority traffic results in reducing the delay for high priority traffic.