Generic Information Transport for Wireless Sensor Networks

A primary functionality of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is transporting the information acquired by the sensors as per the desired application requirements. The diverse applications supported by WSNs also stipulate a diverse range of reliability requirements for the transport of various information types. The continuous variation of application requirements and dynamic operational perturbations complicates the design of a generic solution for information transport in WSNs. In this paper, we present a new framework for generic information transport (GIT), which considers varied application requirements and evolvable network conditions in WSNs. GIT manages the information and utilizes a probabilistic approach to ensure tunable reliability of information transport. The GIT framework is distributed in nature and performs its operations locally. The simulation results validate the tunability of the GIT framework. In some setups GIT achieves up to 4-5 times reduction in number of transmissions compared to existing approaches.