Robcast: A Singlehop Reliable Broadcast Protocol forWireless Sensor Networks

Empirical studies show that wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are extremely prone to the hidden terminal problem. As much as 50% of packet losses have been blamed to the hidden terminal problem under bursty communication. Current protocols use RTS-CTS handshakes to avoid collisions and alleviate the hidden terminal problem for uni- cast communication. However, it is not possible to directly or efficiently generalize this approach to broadcast communication. Motivated by this problem, we propose Robcast, a round-based self-stabilizing protocol for reliably broadcasting data using receiver-side collision detection feedback. The singlehop level reliability of Robcast can form a building block on which future applications and protocols can be designed for WSNs.