A new protocol to enhance the transmission integrity of mobile sensor networks: Horizontal correction and vertical detection

Mobile Sensor networks have become a hot topic of research in the last decade. There are a lot of new applications which employ this kind of network architecture. For example, Body Area Network (BAN) is a new application where multiple sensors on different body parts simultaneously transmit their data to a monitoring unit. In the case of numerous sensors, the addition of active relays which can act as parity nodes in a bipartite graph enables to obtain redundant information to improve the integrity of the transmission. The network topology is somewhat equivalent to that of a block code. However, in the case of a small number of sensors, this technique becomes less efficient. On the other hand, using Automatic Repeat Request (ARQ) protocol, one can avoid transmission errors. In this paper we propose a protocol to combine the two correction methods mentioned above (relaying and ARQ) for mobile sensor networks for a small number of sensors which operate on quasi-static Rayleigh fading channel. Coding error correction is first applied, and then a detection layer will be added to detect errors that were not corrected by the error correction code. Power saving which is crucial in mobile sensor network is greatly improved by our proposed algorithm.