Adaptive Redundancy-Based Transport Layer Protocol For Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are built upon tens to thousands of sensor nodes that are dispersed across a geographical area. Most of the sensor nodes have limited on-board resources, such as limited computing capabilities and limited power. All these issues can reduce the reliability of the sensor nodes, which in turn affects the robustness of the WSN as a whole. One of the components that can be affected is the data transmission system of the sensor nodes. We propose a reliable transport layer protocol that uses a combination of redundant packets and probabilistic transmission to ensure reliable transmission of data while maintaining the efficiency of the network. The proposed protocol does not require acknowledgement packets like TCP and yet has efficiency similar to UDP. It is able to achieve improvements in reliability and efficiency compared to related works including UDP and TCP.