Scheduling different types of packets, such as
real-time and non-real-time data packets, at sensor nodes with
resource constraints in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is of
vital importance to reduce sensors’ energy consumptions and endto-end
data transmission delays. Most of the existing packetscheduling
mechanisms of WSN use First Come First Served
(FCFS), non pre-emptive priority and pre-emptive priority
scheduling algorithms. These algorithms incur a high processing
overhead and long end-to-end data transmission delay due to the
FCFS concept, starvation of high priority real-time data packets
due to the transmission of a large data packet in non pre-emptive
priority scheduling, starvation of non-real-time data packets due
to the probable continuous arrival of real-time data in preemptive
priority scheduling, and improper allocation of data
packets to queues in multilevel queue scheduling algorithms.
Moreover, these algorithms are not dynamic to the changing
requirements of WSN applications since their scheduling policies
are predetermined.
In the Advanced Multilevel Priority packet scheduling
scheme, each node except those at the last level has three levels of
priority queues. According to the priority of the packet and
availability of the queue, node will schedule the packet for
transmission. Due to separated queue availability, packet
transmission delay is reduced. Due to reduction in packet
transmission delay, node can goes into sleep mode as soon as
possible. And Expired packets are deleted at the particular node
at itself before reaching the base station, so that processing
burden on the node is reduced. Thus, energy of the node is saved.