Reliability enhancement of packet delivery in multi-hop wireless sensor network
Abstract Wireless Sensor Networks are used to collect a large amount of data in the field and forward it to data collectors, which are also responsible to analyze such data for a particular purpose. However, the wireless communication is susceptible to noise and interference, which results in loss of information in the routes from the sensors to the data aggregators. In addition, the devices used in these networks have restrictions on their processing, storage, and communication capacity, which diminishes, even more, the reliability of the data delivery. Therefore, this work describes a new communication method named μNet, which aims to increase the delivery rate of packets in multi-hop WSN. Such approach is based on peer-to-peer control messages to ensure that the packet has been properly forwarded. Besides that, the μNet is designed to be compatible with constrained devices, reducing the size of headers of the protocols and the size of the network buffer. By comparing μNet with widely used WSN protocols, it is demonstrated that this approach results in better end-to-end reliability in networks susceptible to interference.