An Error Control Scheme for Delay Constrained Data Communication in a Chain-Based Wireless Sensor Network

Delay sensitive applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) demand timely data delivery for fast identification of out-of-ordinary situations and fast and reliable delivery of notification and warning messages. Due to unreliable nature of WSNs, achieving real-time guarantees and providing reliable data are quite challenging. Reliable data dissemination is traditionally performed by applying error control protocols which are not suitable for time critical applications deployed in a packet burst loss WSN. In this paper, we propose READ+ which is an enhanced version of READ, i.e., a real time and energy efficient error controlling scheme to ensure reliability for delay constrained aggregated data over a bursty channel in a chain-based WSN. In READ+ link qualities are updated either locally by sensor nodes or globally by the Base Station (BS). The simulation results show READ+ performs better considering both hit ratio and energy efficiency compared with the XOR based Forward Error Correction (FEC) and the stop-and-wait (S-W) ARQ specially when duty cycling is low and when either average packet loss is low or packet TTL is short.