Sink controlled reliable transport for disaster recovery

Abstract

We present a reliable transport layer protocol for sensor networks, targeting disaster recovery applications where human or robotic rescuers try to gather information from a possibly fragmented sensor network by moving through the disaster area. The mobility of the information sink means that the protocol must quickly adapt to a constantly changing view of the network, where connections and disconnections are the norm. Our protocol is purely sink driven, that is, the sink controls congestion by rate limiting the sensors, choosing how to assign the available bandwidth to different sensor types and deciding on the level of reliability to be achieved. In addition, our protocol operates at the application layer with minimal requirements from lower layers, allowing its integration with a disaster recovery application that will set its parameters depending on the disaster scenario. As a result, our protocol allows simple and inexpensive fixed sensors to be combined with expensive but reusable mobile equipment for disaster recovery purposes.