Reliable Bursty Convergecast in Multi-Hop Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

We address the challenges of bursty convergecast in multi-hop wireless sensor networks, where a large burst of packets from different locations needs to be transported reliably and in real-time to a base station. Via experiments on a 49 MICA2 mote sensor network using a realistic traffic trace, we determine the primary issues in bursty convergecast, and accordingly design a protocol, RBC (for Reliable Bursty Convergecast), to address these issues: To improve channel utilization and to reduce ack-loss, we design a window-less block acknowledgment scheme that guarantees continuous packet forwarding and replicates the acknowledgment for a packet; to alleviate retransmission-incurred channel contention, we introduce differentiated contention control. Moreover, we design mechanisms to handle varying ack-delay, to reduce delay in timer-based retransmissions, and to avoid queue overflow. We evaluate RBC, again via experiments, and show that compared to a commonly used implicit-ack scheme, RBC doubles packet delivery ratio and reduces end-to-end delay by an order of magnitude, as a result of which RBC achieves a close-to-optimal good put.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Feb 01, 2004
Accession Number
AD1001192

Entities

People

  • Anish K. Arora
  • Hongwei Zhang
  • Mohamed G. Gouda
  • Young-ri Choi

Organizations

  • Ohio State University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Communication Channels
  • Computer Networks
  • Computer Science
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Electronic Mail
  • Hypervelocity Flow
  • Mesh Networks
  • Network Topology
  • Networks
  • Packet Loss
  • Probability
  • Reliability
  • Routing Protocols
  • Sensor Networks
  • Throughput
  • Wireless Sensor Networks

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Networking