Optimized Transmission Scheme for Communication Reliability in Wireless Sensor Networks

Data packets in multi-hop wireless sensor networks require a variety of Communication Reliability (CR) according to applications. Recently, a scheme for supporting a desired CR, called AC, has proposed. In order to support the desired CR, AC simply maintains 100% of data packets of a source at intermediate nodes on a routing path which do not satisfy the desired CR. However, since AC does not consider the link quality of each intermediate node on the routing path, it highly increases the number of total packets which are transmitted on the routing path for achieving the desired CR. To solve the high number of totally transmitted packets in AC, we propose an effective transmission scheme, MTTP, which can reduce the number of totally transmitted packets for achieving the desired CR. By geometric programming, MTTP allocates an optimized one-hop packet transmission rate of each wireless link by considering the quality of wireless links on the routing path. However, AC and MTTP consider only one next-hop node on the routing path even though one node has many one-hop neighbors in practice. Accordingly, we propose another scheme, MTTP_Prime, which consider many one-hop neighbors. By dynamic programming, MTTP_Prime selects a routing path with optimized one-hop packet transmission rates in terms of the number of totally transmitted packets. Simulation results verify that MTTP is superior to AC, and MTTP_Prime is superior to MTTP.