  Protocols developed during the last years for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs)
are mainly focused on energy efficiency and autonomous mechanisms (e.g.
self-organization, self-configuration, etc). Nevertheless, with new WSN
applications, appear new QoS requirements such as time constraints. Real-time
applications require the packets to be delivered before a known time bound
which depends on the application requirements. We particularly focus on
applications which consist in alarms sent to the sink node. We propose
Real-Time X-layer Protocol (RTXP), a real-time communication protocol. To the
best of our knowledge, RTXP is the first MAC and routing real-time
communication protocol that is not centralized, but instead relies only on
local information. The solution is cross-layer (X-layer) because it allows to
control the delays due to MAC and Routing layers interactions. RTXP uses a
suited hop-count-based Virtual Coordinate System which allows deterministic
medium access and forwarder selection. In this paper we describe the protocol
mechanisms. We give theoretical bound on the end-to-end delay and the capacity
of the protocol. Intensive simulation results confirm the theoretical
predictions and allow to compare with a real-time centralized solution. RTXP is
also simulated under harsh radio channel, in this case the radio link
introduces probabilistic behavior. Nevertheless, we show that RTXP it performs
better than a non-deterministic solution. It thus advocates for the usefulness
of designing real-time (deterministic) protocols even for highly unreliable
networks such as WSNs.
