Contention-based Reliable Delivery Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Providing efficient and reliable delivery in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a challenging problem. A kind of contention-based reliable delivery scheme (CRDS) has been proposed in this paper. By utilizing the characteristic of highly dense deployment of nodes in WSNs and broadcast feature of wireless channels, CRDS forwards the packet in the unit of cluster in the process of data transmission and it is implemented through collaboration among cluster members to improve the reliability of delivery. The number of cluster members is constrained to limit the number of forwarding nodes, which can effectively reduce the end-to-end delay and energy consumption caused by redundant forwarding. CRDS is contention-based geographic forwarding scheme, in which the cluster is elected through “back-off competition” mechanism before each hop of packet forwarding, and upon completion of forwarding task, the cluster automatically revoked. CRDS is assessed through ns-2 simulation. Performance results prove the advantages of the proposed solution in comparison with other existing protocols.