Hybrid Energy Efficient Protocol with Service Differentiation for QoS Provisions in Multi-Hop WSNs

The growing demand of usage of wireless sensors networks (WSNs) in multiple types of applications such as environment monitoring or asset tracking makes the quality-of-service (QoS) a paramount topic in wireless sensors applications. In these applications, each sensor node may collect different types of data with different levels of importance involving a different treatment to meet QoS purpose. Consequently, a sensor network should be ready to spend more resources in transmitting packets that hold more important information. In this paper, the authors propose an enhanced protocol with differentiated services for WSNs called QoS-HEEP. The proposed protocol is an improvement of HEEP protocol while providing requested quality of service for high priority real time traffic, which is distinguished from the low priority and non-real time traffic. Thus, input traffic streams are served based on their priorities. Through simulations using NS Simulator; it is observed that the authors' proposal outperforms more than other protocols developed in the literature for QoS provisions in WSNs.