A New, Reliable, Energy-efficient Data Transfer Protocol for Transferring Data in WSN

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of autonomous sensors which are spatially distributed, used to monitor physical or environmental conditions. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are typically constrained in energy and resource. Since in most WSN applications, the traffic pattern is sensor-to-sink, in-network data aggregation methods are employed in order for effectively utilizing available resources. In order to transfer the aggregated data packets reliably, data transport protocols are required which provide reliability at the packet level. The protocols which are currently used to provide reliable data transfer for sensor-to-sink traffic, either provide reliability at the event level or are not energy efficient. In order to achieve energy-efficiency, alongside with enhanced packet-level reliability, an energy-efficient reliable data transfer protocol is proposed here, which provides packet level reliability by extending the concept of monitors, and employing duty cycles, improves the energy-efficiency. This new protocol is tested in terms of performance, and experimental results show that the new protocol leads to significant improvement in packet delivery ratio and energy savings.