The Wireless Modular Transport Protocol

A new modular transport layer protocol for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is proposed: WMTP – Wireless Modular Transport Protocol. This protocol not only allows the simultaneous use of all the main features commonly found in WSN transport protocols, namely congestion control, fairness, and reliability, but also does so in a modular fashion. This way, the application layer can choose to use exactly the features that it requires, without having to deal with the inevitable trade-offs of those that it doesn’t. Additionally, WMTP provides its own unique set of uncommon features such as throttling, flow-control, transport layer quality-of-service, and optional integration with service-discovery. Simulation results show that, not only do the implemented features operate as expected, but, with the exception of WMTP reliability, they also manage to do this with minimal energy cost, since, under the simulated test scenario, the protocol overhead was determined to be generally below 10%.