High reliable multi-hop transmission for sensor data in mine tunnels

Wireless sensor network (WSN) and wireless mesh network (WMN) suffer frequent disruptions and limited capacity for delivering sensor data in mine tunnels. A Braided Cooperative Reliable Transport (BCRT) algorithm which maintains one-hop reliability to insure end-to-end reliability is proposed. BCRT is not sensitive to route breaks, since it optimizes the data rate on every forwarding node and lost packets are retransmitted locally. The key of BCRT is a cooperative rate control method, in which every three contiguous nodes along a routing path exchange their information about link-occupied conditions. Then they adjust their data rate respectively based on that information to maximize the three-hop throughput before the path breaks. The comparison of BCRT with TCP and Vegas shows that BCRT improves end-to-end throughput in mine tunnels.