Reliable bursty convergecast in wireless sensor networks

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 and to reduce delay in timer-based retransmissions. We evaluate RBC, again via experiments, and show that compared to a commonly used implicit-ack scheme, RBC doubles packet delivery ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: MOBIHOC
• Authors: Hongwei Zhang, Anish Arora, Young-ri Choi, Mohamed G. Gouda
• Keywords: Block Acknowledgment Scheme, Continuous Packet Forwarding, MOBIHOC 2005, RBC Doubles Packet, Wireless Networks