A novel channel aware stage ARQ in wide area Wireless Sensor Networks

In wide area Wireless Sensor Networks, end-to-end ARQ (Automatic Repeat reQuest) may incur frequent retransmissions and significant energy consumption due to packet loss in multi-hop routes. On the other hand, hop-by-hop ARQ requires each node to be equipped with sufficient buffer and energy for data caching and retransmission, which is not always practical in wide area networks. To achieve a balance between communication reliability and resource consumption, this paper proposes a novel Channel Aware Stage ARQ (CASA), which divides the multi-hop route into several ARQ segments according to the channel quality. Each ARQ segment implements packet confirmation and retransmission separately. Comparing to traditional ARQ schemes, CASA achieves required reliability with reduced network cost and energy consumption. Extensive simulation validated the performance of CASA.