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In data-intensive real-time applications, such as smart transportation and manufacturing, ensuring data freshness is essential, as using obsolete data can lead to negative outcomes. Validity intervals serve as the standard means to specify freshness requirements in real-time databases. In this paper, we bring attention to significant drawbacks of validity intervals that have largely been unnoticed and introduce a new definition of data freshness, while discussing future research directions to address these limitations.

We consider the problem of real-time data dissemination in wireless sensor networks, in which data are associated with deadlines and it is desired for data to reach the sink(s) by their deadlines. To this end, existing real-time data dissemination work have developed packet scheduling schemes that prioritize packets according to their deadlines. In this paper, we first demonstrate that not only the scheduling discipline but also the routing protocol has a significant impact on the success of real-time sensor data dissemination. We show that the shortest path routing using the minimum number of hops leads to considerably better performance than Geographical Forwarding, which has often been used in existing real-time data dissemination work. We also observe that packet prioritization by itself is not enough for real-time data dissemination, since many high priority packets may simultaneously contend for network resources, deteriorating the network performance. Instead, real-time packets could be judiciously delayed to avoid severe contention as long as their deadlines can be met. Based on this observation, we propose a Just-in-Time Scheduling (JiTS) algorithm for scheduling data transmissions to alleviate the shortcomings of the existing solutions. We explore several policies for non-uniformly delaying data at different intermediate nodes to account for the higher expected contention as the packet gets closer to the sink(s). By an extensive simulation study, we demonstrate that JiTS can significantly improve the deadline miss ratio and packet drop ratio compared to existing approaches in various situations. Notably, JiTS improves the performance requiring neither lower layer support nor synchronization among the sensor nodes.

The ability of a sensor node to determine its physical location within a network (Localization) is of fundamental importance in sensor networks. Interpretating data from sensors will not be possible unless the context of the data is known; this is most often accomplished by tracking its physical location. Existing research has focused on localization in static sensor networks where localization is a one-time (or low frequency) activity. In contrast, this paper considers localization for mobile sensors: when sensors are mobile, localization must be invoked periodically to enable the sensors to track their location. The higher the frequency of localization, the lower the error introduced because of mobility. However, localization is a costly operation since it involves both communication and computation. In this paper, we propose and investigate adaptive and predictive protocols that control the frequency of localization based on sensor mobility behavior to reduce the energy requirements for localization while bounding the localization error. We show that such protocols can significantly reduce the localization energy without sacrificing accuracy (in fact, improving accuracy for most situations). Using simulation and analysis we explore the tradeoff between energy efficiency and localization error due to mobility for several protocols., Comment: 10 Pages