Reliable bursty convergecast in wireless sensor networks

  • Authors:

  • Hongwei Zhang;Anish Arora;Young-ri Choi;Mohamed G. Gouda

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA;Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210, USA;Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712-0233, USA;Department of Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712-0233, USA

  • Venue:
  • Computer Communications
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

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 ratio and reduces end-to-end delay by an order of magnitude, as a result of which RBC achieves a close-to-optimal goodput.