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However, existing work cannot utilize multiple channels to provide explicit guarantees for application-specified end-to-end communication delays, which are critical to many real-time applications such as surveillance and disaster response. In this article, we propose MCRT, a multichannel real-time communication protocol that features a flow-based channel allocation strategy. Because of the small number of orthogonal channels available in current mote hardware, MCRT allocates channels to network partitions formed based on many-to-one data flows. To achieve bounded end-to-end communication delay for every data flow, the channel allocation problem has been formulated as a constrained optimization problem and proven to be NP-complete. We then present the design of MCRT, which includes a channel allocation algorithm and a real-time packet forwarding strategy. Extensive simulation results based on a realistic radio model and empirical results on a real hardware testbed of Tmote nodes both demonstrate that MCRT can effectively utilize multiple channels to reduce the number of deadlines missed in end-to-end communications. Our results also show that MCRT outperforms a state-of-the-art real-time protocol and two baseline multichannel communication schemes.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1145\/1993042.1993044","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2011,8,30]],"date-time":"2011-08-30T13:30:18Z","timestamp":1314711018000},"page":"1-30","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/crossmark-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":7,"title":["MCRT"],"prefix":"10.1145","volume":"8","author":[{"given":"Xiaorui","family":"Wang","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"The Ohio State University"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Xiaodong","family":"Wang","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"The Ohio State University"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Xing","family":"Fu","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"The Ohio State University"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Guoliang","family":"Xing","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Michigan State University"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"320","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2011,8]]},"reference":[{"key":"e_1_2_1_1_1","volume-title":"Proceedings of the 21st Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies.","volume":"2","author":"Ahn G.-S.","unstructured":"Ahn , G.-S. , Campbell , A. , Veres , A. , and Sun , L . -H. 2002. 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