  Today's sensor network implementations often comprise various types of nodes
connected with different types of networks. These and various other aspects
influence the delay of transmitting data and therefore of out-of-order data
occurrences. This turns into a crucial problem in time-sensitive applications
where data must be processed promptly and decisions must be reliable.
  In this paper, we were researching dynamic buffer sizing algorithms for
multiple, distributed and independent sources, which reorder event streams,
thus enabling subsequent time-sensitive applications to work correctly. To be
able to evaluate such algorithms, we had to record datasets first. Five novel
dynamic buffer sizing algorithms were implemented and compared to
state-of-the-art approaches in this domain. The evaluation has shown that the
use of a dynamic time-out buffering method is preferable over a static buffer.
The higher the variation of the network or other influences in the environment,
the more necessary it becomes to use an algorithm which dynamically adapts its
buffer size. These algorithms are universally applicable, easy to integrate in
existing architectures, and particularly interesting for time-sensitive
applications. Dynamic time-out buffering is still a trade-off between reaction
time and out-of-order event compensation.
