Statistical reliability for energy efficient data transport in wireless sensor networks

Typical wireless sensor network deployments are expected to be in unattended terrains where link packet error rate may be as high as 70% and path length could be up to tens of hops. In coping with such harsh conditions, we introduce a new notion of statistical reliability to achieve a balance between data reliability and energy consumption. Under this new paradigm, the energy efficiency of a comprehensive set of statistically reliable data delivery protocols are analyzed. Based on the insight gained, we propose a hybrid system which combines the energy efficient and statistically reliable transport (eESRT) protocol with the implicit and explicit ARQ (ieARQ) protocol. This hybrid system adaptively switches between eESRT and ieARQ machanisms according to a dynamic hop threshold H_sw proposed in this work. Simulation and experiment results confirm our theoretical findings and demonstrate the advantages the hybrid system in boosting energy efficiency, reducing end to end delay, and in overcoming the “avalanche” effect.