Energy efficient reliable data transmission in resource constrained Ad-Hoc communication networks

The wireless sensor network (WSN) is one of the resource constrained ad-hoc communication networks, having limited resources such as storage space, energy and computational capability. In addition to this it suffers from quick changes in the structure of the wireless link due to variations of the signal strength, interference, and multi-path propagation characteristics. Reliable energy efficient data transmission in WSNs to prolong the network lifetime is an important and challenging issue. In general, there are several approaches like multi-path routing and source coding, automatic repeat request, used for providing reliable data transfer in WSNs. But the overhead and performance of such end-to-end single-path approaches are often dominated by congestion as well as some poor-quality links or nodes on the path. That is, these traditional approaches are not able to quickly and properly react in this multi-hop wireless environment. To cope with the above issues, in this paper we propose an energy efficient reliable data transfer scheme named as "Adaptive Sectoring Scheme for Reliability (ASSR)" for WSNs. In this approach, the given sensor field is divided into sectors activated one at a time by the occurrence of an event. To minimize the congestion as well as to increase the throughput with maximum packet delivery ratio, the sectoring process is adjusted dynamically to ensure reliable data transmission. Simulation experiments show that the proposed scheme leads to an improvement of the reliability and energy consumption.