ACF: An autonomic communication framework for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The performance of wireless sensor networks in the field has been shown to be both unreliable and unpredictable. One reason for this is that radio links between pairs of nodes are often unstable, with significant variation in performance over both time and space. Timeout-based, streaming and ExOR protocols, which represent three mechanisms used in improving the reliability in data delivery, are analysed and areas of good and poor performance are identified for certain combinations of packet delivery probabilities on the communication links. A new autonomic communication framework (ACF) is proposed for sensor networks, which is able to adapt to changing environments. Experimental results show that our framework optimises performance under different environmental conditions for performance measures including link efficiency and energy consumption. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.