Green partial packet recovery in wireless sensor networks

• Compare existing frame fragmentation techniques in terms of energy consumption.
• Design and implement a green partial packet recovery scheme for WSN motes.
• Our Scheme, called Green-Frag, adapts the transmit power based on channel quality.
• Propose a novel method for calculating the energy consumption in WSNs motes.

Partial packet recovery is well known for increasing network throughput and reducing frame retransmissions. However, partial packet recovery methods in the literature are not energy-aware and hence they are not suitable for the battery powered wireless sensor motes. We propose Green-Frag, a novel adaptive partial packet recovery mechanism that is energy friendly. It can help prolonging the battery life of wireless sensor motes that are usually resource constrained. It dynamically partitions the frame into smaller blocks to avoid dropping the whole frame due to a single bit error. Also, Green-Frag is able to tolerate high interference and save energy by varying the transmit power based on channel quality and interference pattern. We experimentally evaluate the energy efficiency as well as goodput and delay of Green-Frag using our TelosB sensor mote testbed. We find that Green-Frag reduces energy consumption by 33% on average compared to the state of the art partial packet recovery scheme in the literature in the presence of Wi-Fi interference. In the worst case, this reduction in energy consumption comes at the cost of 10% reduction in goodput. Finally, Green-Frag reduces the latency by 22% on average compared to other static frame fragmentation schemes.