An Adaptive Redundancy-Based Mechanism for Fast and Reliable Data Collection in WSNs

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can be used for a variety of applications. For many applications, a high reliability and low delay are required. Due to lossy feature of wireless channel, providing a reliable communication is very challenging. The most frequently used approach for providing the reliability is to use the acknowledgement based retransmission mechanism which increases the end-to-end delay especially when the number of hops from a sensor to the sink node is large. In this paper, we propose a redundancy-based approach to provide a high reliability while maintaining a low end-to-end delay. The proposed mechanism uses a redundant transmission when a link is unreliable or the end-to-end delay requirement is strict. We implement the proposed mechanism on a wireless sensor network which consists of IRIS motes, and evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism.