Arbor: A Robust, Reliable, and Platform-Independent Collection Service

We describe the design and implementation of Arbor, a collection tree protocol for wireless sensor networks. We identify a set of six metrics for collection protocols based on their use in the literature. We identify and measure the issues that harm these metrics in practice, and from these observations define the Arbor protocol. Using three different sensor note platforms, two operating systems, and three testbeds, we evaluate Arbor in comparison to existing collection protocols. We find that for low-rate collection applications, Arbor can achieve three nines of reliability, sends few retransmissions, and can quickly adapt to changes in the network topology. Furthermore, as the Arbor protocol is hardware-independent, it is not constrained to a single link layer.