Store-and-Forward in High Traffic Sensor Networks

In this paper, we evaluate the impact of different numbers of nodes and their probability of sending data in an IEEE802.15.4 star topology sensor network where several background nodes attempt to communicate their sensor readings while a foreground node is required to send larger amounts of data, e.g., a low-resolution or low-frame rate video stream, to the sink of the local network. For such scenario, it might be beneficial to adapt a store-and-forward transmission strategy, which can be implemented by switching the utilized wireless channel. We provide an overview of the available channel bandwidth calculations and derive the maximum allowable times that switching between different channels is allowed to take if the foreground node and the local sink node were to switch channels to allow exclusive streaming of data. We find that for a generalized scenario with high traffic in the network, switching times of around 7s are allowable, which should fall within realistic ranges to expect.