OAC: An optimized transmission scheme for flexible communication reliability in wireless sensor networks

Due to the high packet loss rate during multi-hop transmissions in wireless sensor networks, a reliable end-to-end delivery scheme is desired. But, in some applications, there is no need of 100% communication reliability (CR). Active caching is a novel scheme which can satisfy the flexible CR. However, in this scheme, only caching nodes can detect missing packets, so the retransmission efficiency is low. In this paper, we propose a more efficient scheme named OAC (optimized active caching) which exploits the broadcasting nature of wireless communication to detect packet loss. The results based on simulation show that the proposed scheme has advantages in retransmission counts and time-delay. And thus energy is saved at the same time.