An energy-efficient reliable transport for wireless sensor networks

In a wireless sensor network, sensor devices are connected by unreliable radio channels. Thus, the reliable packet delivery is an important design challenge. The existing sensor-to-base reliable transport mechanism, however, depends on a centralized manager node, incurring large control overheads of synchronizing reporting frequencies. In this paper, we present a decentralized reliable transport (DRT) with two novel decentralized reliability control schemes. First, we propose an independent reporting scheme where each sensor node stochastically makes reporting decisions. Second, we describe a cooperative reporting scheme where every sensor node implicitly cooperates with its neighbors for the uniform reporting. In the reporting step, DRT uses a reliable MAC channel, which is specifically optimized for reducing the energy dissipation. Experimental results show that DRT satisfies the desired delivery rate reliably in a decentralized manner while it significantly reduces the energy consumption of the radio device and the communication time.