Analytical Evaluation of Retransmission Schemes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Retransmission has been adopted as one of the most popular schemes for improving transmission reliability in wireless sensor networks. Many previous works have been done on reliable transmission issues in experimental ways, however, there still lack of analytical techniques to evaluate these solutions. Based on the traffic model, service model and energy model, we propose an analytical method to analyze the delay and energy metrics of two categories of retransmission schemes: hop-by- hop retransmission (HBH) and end-to-end retransmission (ETE). With the experiment results, the maximum packet transfer delay and energy efficiency of these two scheme are compared in several scenarios. Moreover, the analytical results of transfer delay are validated through simulations. Our experiments demonstrate that HBH has less energy consumption at the cost of larger transfer delay compared with ETE. With the same target success probability, ETE is superior on the delay metric for low bit-error- rate (BER) cases, while HBH is superior for high BER cases.