Analysis of A Loss-Resilient Proactive Data Transmission Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Many of sensor network applications require reliable data communication such that data packets can be delivered to the destination without loss. However, existing reliable transmission techniques either are too costly for resource-constrained sensor networks or have limited capabilities for achieving desirable reliability. In this paper, an effective coding scheme that exploits the tradeoff between redundant data transmission and encoding/decoding complexity is proposed, with an in-depth study on two key design parameters, the degree of repair packets and the number of repair packets. Furthermore, the expected probability of a destination obtaining all data packets under recoverable and permanent failure model for proactive transmission is analyzed, respectively. Simulations have been conducted to verify our theoretical results. The simulation results reveal profound insights in achieving high communication reliability in wireless sensor networks.