Adaptive ARQ in wireless sensor networks

Currently, in the MAC protocol of wireless sensor network, the sender mote sends data with or without receiving acknowledgements (ACK). Although in some applications, people enable the ACK function, they just use the fixed repeat times. In such scenarios, the sender mote does not care about the quality of the channel when they have to send the data. However, in the real world, the channel may not be good thus resulting in a poor delivery rate. For example, motes that are neighbors of the sender mote may also send data at the same time. This indeed leads to collision. This paper recommends the use of the Adaptive Repeat Request (ARQ) scheme for the MAC with fuzzy logic control to reduce the collisions in the channel thus improving the delivery rate in comparison to the current MAC protocols. We implement our method with only a small number of sensor motes. Obtained results show that ARQ has 5-30% more delivery rate than the other two methods.