A Reliable Transmission Strategy in Unreliable Wireless Sensor Networks

Recent empirical and theoretical studies have shown that wireless links in low-power sensor networks are unreliable. Obviously, it is not a good choice for sensor networks that transmitting data unreliably, which will bring many problems to the networks, such as uncertainty, performance-decline, and so on. In this paper, a novel transmission strategy for reliable transmitting over unreliable links is proposed. Based on the observation that the broadcast nature of the wireless communications has the potential that allows all neighbors receive and process the packets simultaneously, we suggest that using a nodes-set, instead of one node, to receive and relay packets. The key idea is that receiving packets simultaneously and relaying packets competitively. Theoretical and experimental analysis demonstrates that the new strategy can provide reliable transmitting over unreliable links meanwhile improves the performance of networks significantly.