A Reliable Low-power and High Throughput Wireless Sensor Network Data Collection

This paper presents a data gathering protocol for wireless sensor network applications that require high throughput, reliability, and low-power. Insofar as high throughput is concerned, TDMA is more suitable than CSMA. Efficient TDMA protocols require solid synchronization and more optimized time slot scheduling; reliable data collection calls for end-to-end packet retransmission. Such factors hinder the implementation of a comprehensive data collection protocol. In this paper, a heuristic TDMA scheduling algorithm is provided to achieve optimized time slot scheduling with multi-channel communication. The combination of TDMA and multi-channel communication affords to sustain high throughput and low-power. In addition, constructive interference based flooding is adopted to provide robust synchronization and efficient downward communication. We associate constructive interference based flooding with packet retransmission to implement collection reliability. The proposed protocol is implemented on Tmote Sky sensor node with Contiki operating system. Experimental results in a deployed network consisting of 29 sensor nodes show that it is able to provide throughput as high as 14.66KByte/s with 100% data collection.