WSN14-4: Energy-efficient Reliable Transmission Protocol with Outsourcing in WSNs

Energy has been identified as a crucial resource in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Since it is usually difficult to recharge the sensors deployed in a remote or hostile environment, reducing the energy consumption is the key to prolong the lifetime of the network. In this paper, we investigate an energy-saving strategy, called outsourcing, which allows a sensor to outsource tasks to others in order to reduce the overall energy consumption as well as the energy consumption of the sensors with low remaining energy. Based on this strategy, we designed an energy-efficient reliable transport protocol that intelligently distributes the task of data recovery. Both analysis and simulations show the significant reduction in energy consumption. In addition, the implementation of the proposed scheme requires minor modification to the existing protocols.