Delivery packets reliably and efficiently over error prone channel of WSNs

In wireless sensor networks, it has been proved that the reliable transmission protocols sending redundant packets to the upstream neighbour hop-by-hop have advantage on energy efficiency compared with those using end-to-end error recovery and control scheme. It provides an opportunity for applications to find a trade off point regarding transmission probability and energy consumption. The problem is, though, this kind of protocol loses a bit of its charm when considering burst and deep channel errors. According to this, the burst and deep fading avoid transmission protocol (FATP) is proposed. The novelty of this protocol is that, by using channel model technology and hidden Markov model (HMM) based algorithm, it can evade the burst and deep fading period of the wireless channel artfully with high probability. A detailed theoretic performance analysis process is presented in this paper. Compare with previous hop-by-hop reliable transmission protocols, the numerical results reveal that FATP can improve the energy efficiency significantly. Furthermore, if the channel bit error rate filter threshold is tuned in appropriate range, the delivery delay could be controlled in an acceptable value or even lower than other hop-by-hop reliable transmission protocols, especially in high BER conditions.