Improving Packet Delivery Ratio Estimation for Indoor Ad Hoc and Wireless Sensor Networks

Many protocols in wireless sensor networks use Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) as a metric to select the best route, transmission rate or power. PDR is normally estimated either by counting the number of received hello/data messages in a small period of time, i.e., less than 1 second, or by taking the history of PDR into account. The first method is accurate but requires many packets to be sent, which costs too much energy. The second one is energy efficient, but fails to achieve good accuracy. Therefore in this paper we propose a novel estimation method which takes advantage of receiving signal strength. We show with extensive experimental results that the proposed method is 25% more accurate than the second estimation method, while being simple and energy efficient at the same time.