An Efficient Burst Transmission Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper addresses link quality fluctuation and its impact on the packet delivery capacity of wireless sensor networks. Independent studies have previously confirmed that link quality fluctuates even in a static deployment and understanding stable durations, good and bad alike, can contribute to the efficient transmission of packets. We propose a two stage Markov model to characterise link quality fluctuation and to determine when and for how long nodes should transmit packets in burst. Both to develop and test our model, we deployed a wireless sensor network consisting of 14 nodes in a garden and transmitted more than 120,000 packets with different links. The experiment results confirm that our approach improved the packet delivery capacity of the links by up to 40% when compared with a baseline and by up to 25% when compared with a scheme that employs conditional distribution functions.