A reliable delivery protocol based on competition and cooperation for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) usually work under harsh environment, so high packet loss rate is induced by the unreliable and error-prone wireless links. To cope with the problem, a competition and cooperation based reliable forwarding protocol (CCRF) is proposed. In CCRF, the characteristic of dense deployment of sensor nodes and broadcast feature of the wireless channel in WSN are utilized. Specifically, adjacent nodes along the path spontaneously constitute a receiving cluster in data forwarding and then data reception and acknowledgement are executed by the means of cooperation among the cluster members to enhance data forwarding reliability and to reduce energy consumption caused by redundant transmission. In the routing, distributed fuzzy integral assessment algorithm is adopted, by which differentiated priorities of the clusters along the path are allocated in accordance with the resource condition including forwarding reliability, forwarding distance per hop and remaining energy and next-hop receiving cluster in possession of optimal resource is dynamically selected through back-off competition to achieve the efficient transmission. The NS2 simulation result further corroborate its superior integrated performance compared with homogeneous protocols.