LOFT: A Latency-Oriented Fault Tolerant Transport Protocol for Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks

— Wireless sensor-actuator networks, or WSANs, refer to a group of sensors and actuators which collect data from the environment and perform application-specific actions in response. To act responsively and accurately, an efficient and reliable data transport protocol is crucial for the sensors to inform the actuators about the environmental events. Unfortunately, the low-power multi-hop communications in WSANs are inherently unreliable; the frequent sensor and link failures as well as the excessive delays due to congestion further aggravate the problem. In this paper, we propose a latency-oriented fault tolerant data transport protocol in WSANs. We argue that reliable data transport in such a real-time system should resist to the transmission failures, and should also consider the importance and freshness of the reported data. We articulate this argument and provide a cross-layer two-step data transport protocol for ontime and fault tolerant data delivery from sensors to actuators...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: GLOBECOM
• Authors: Edith C. H. Ngai, Yangfan Zhou, Michael R. Lyu, Jiangchuan Liu
• Keywords: Data Transport Protocol, Fault Tolerant Data, GLOBECOM 2007, Reliable Data Transport, Telecommunications