Evaluating the impact of acknowledgment strategies on message delivery rate in wireless sensor networks

In WSNs, several strategies are being developed to guarantee the delivery of information messages. Despite the fact that these efforts increase the delivery rate, they also imply an additional network overhead that could drain the node´s batteries power. As a result, if a node runs out of battery power before its time it will not be able to deliver data anymore, thus affecting the whole system´s operation. This research compares two confirmation delivery strategies based on explicit and implicit acknowledgment, which could take advantage of wireless communication features to deliver sensed data with efficiency, and also manage the node energy resources in such a way that the continuous operation of the WSNs could be extended. A WSN simulation model on Visual Sense/Ptolemy II modeling framework was built to compare these two acknowledgment strategies. As a result of this evaluation we can see that the implicit acknowledgment strategy reaches a slightly better reliability with a lower cost.