Energy-efficient reliable packet delivery in variable-power wireless sensor networks

Energy efficient and reliable data forwarding becomes important if resources are limited such as in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Data-centric routing approaches have been proposed in the literature to provide more energy-efficient routing as opposed to the traditional end-to-end routing schemes known as address-centric approaches. In this paper, we present the variable-power data-centric routing technique in which each sensor node (source) adjusts its transmission power based on the distance between itself and the receiver (data recipient/sink). We discuss how the error rate associated with a link affects the overall probability of reliable delivery, and consequently the energy associated with the reliable transmission of a single packet. The analysis includes both fixed-power and variable-power scenarios along with the End-to-End Retransmission (EER) and Hop-by-Hop Retransmission (HHR) techniques.