Efficient block retransmission for reliable data delivery in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Data link layer framing in wireless sensor networks (WSN) usually faces a trade-off between large frame sizes for high channel utilization and small frame sizes for effective error recovery. This paper presents a novel design scheme, which resolves the dilemma by decoupling framing from error recovery. Meanwhile, it breaks the packet into many blocks, adds CRC to every block for error detection, and packages several such blocks into a frame. The receiver retransmits erroneous blocks only. Consequently, the FER become irrelevant to frame size. A frame can therefore be sufficiently large in great favor of high utilization of wireless channel. This scheme has been implemented as a new data link layer in TinyOS, and evaluated through real experiment. The result shows that it improves the throughput by at least 30 % under typical wireless channel condition. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media.