Trade-off between reliability and energy-efficiency in transport protocol for wireless sensor networks

Efficient design and implementation of wireless sensor networks has become a hot area of research in recent years. In comparison with other existing networks, wireless sensor networks (WSN) have some limitations. Typically, nodes in WSN have limited power, computational capacity, and memory. These problems require the need of having particular protocols designed for WSN. Currently, many research focused on developing transport protocols. This paper proposes a probability model that can be applied in transport protocols using hop-by-hop and end-to-end mechanism. From this model, we evaluate the number of hops that a packet has to pass when it is being sent from source to destination. We also solve the optimal number of transmissions in transport layer. The result from this model shows that there is a trade-off between reliability and energy-efficiency.