Distributed Coordination of Sensors for End-to-End Reliable Event and Query Delivery

This paper presents a new transport solution for WSNs addressing bidirectional end-to-end event and query reliability. The authors aim to reduce the reliable transport overhead while guaranteeing the reliability to deliver all events and queries in WSN applications. The proposed lightweight solution can achieve desired event reliability in conjunction with query reliability by operating with the least possible number of messages, and using a small subset of coordinators which are responsible of loss detection and recovery. Coordinators are selected using a distributed, low-cost algorithm with adaptive path discovery and maintenance features to utilize the cost of retransmissions and energy consumption. Simulation results show that, using such a coordination of sensors, significant savings on communication costs for event and query reliability are attainable while minimizing packet loss, energy consumption, and end-to-end delay.