Coded packets over lossy links: A redundancy-based mechanism for reliable and fast data collection in sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), many applications require a high degree of reliability with low delay. Due to the lossy nature of wireless channels, achieving reliable communication can be very challenging. The most commonly adopted approach for achieving reliability is the acknowledgment based retransmission mechanism; however, this approach is inefficient in terms of end-to-end delay especially when there are a large number of hops from a sensor to the sink node. In this paper, we propose a redundancy-based approach that achieves high reliability and low end-to-end delay. The proposed protocol employs a network coding-based approach to improve packet redundancy when a link is unreliable or there is a strict end-to-end delay requirement. The protocol adaptively changes the redundancy level according to the application requirements and link loss rate. The protocol can be implemented easily because modification of the application layer at the source node and destination node is the only mandatory requirement. We implement the proposed mechanism on a real testbed which consists of IRIS motes, and evaluate the performance of the proposed mechanism using real-world experiments, network simulations and theoretical analysis.