Datalink streaming in wireless sensor networks

Datalink layer framing in wireless sensor networks usually faces a trade-off between large frame sizes for high channel bandwidth utilization and small frame sizes for effective error recovery. Given the high error rates of intermote communications, TinyOS opts in favor of small frame sizes at the cost of extremely low channel bandwidth utilization. In this paper, we describe Seda: a streaming datalink layer that resolves the above dilemma by decoupling framing from error recovery. Seda treats the packets from the upper layer as a continuous stream of bytes. It breaks the data stream into blocks, and retransmits erroneous blocks only (as opposed to the entire erroneous frame). Consequently, the frame-error-rate (FER), the main factor that bounds the frame size in the current design, becomes irrelevant to error recovery. A frame can therefore be sufficiently large in great favor of high utilization of the wireless channel bandwidth, without compromising the effectiveness of error reco...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: SENSYS
• Authors: Raghu K. Ganti, Praveen Jayachandran, Haiyun Luo, Tarek F. Abdelzaher
• Keywords: Datalink Layer, Error Recovery, Frame Size, Sensor Networks, SENSYS 2006