Up Torrent: An Efficient Data Collection Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Transmission collision causes serious performance issues for wireless sensor networks, especially for dense wireless networks with loose links. Conventional medium access control (MAC) protocols use collision avoidance to maintain data transmission. For CSMA protocols, senders always conservatively choose the size of backoff window. However, traditional CSMA-based protocols usually increase the packet delay, in this work, we propose an probability based concurrent transmission protocol for data collection scenario in multi-hop wireless sensor networks. By adjusting the transmission probability of channel competitors, we efficiently reduce packet delays and improves the channel utilization. We evaluate our protocol with extensive experimental simulations, and the results indicate that the proposed protocol improves channel utilization and works well.