Energy Efficient Data Fragmentation for Ubiquitous Computing

Network lifetime and power consumption are crucial for any energy constrained ubiquitous networks, such as wireless sensor network (WSN) and wireless body area network (WBAN). A special challenge in WSN and WBAN is a transmission of a large volume of data, such as medical or non-medical images and video, which are becoming more and more demanding in various applications. Media transmission on a wireless network is very much prone to communication errors. Thus, for the efficient design, the large data messages are broken down into smaller fragments, and those smaller fragments are transmitted sequentially. But, this approach introduces the burden of exchanging redundant control packets increasing energy consumption as well as transmission delay. In this paper, we propose a data fragmentation scheme using a block acknowledgment mechanism to minimize the number of the control packets and transmission delay caused by fragmentation. We implemented the proposed scheme in various existing medium access control protocols and compared it with the original protocols through NS-2 simulations. The simulation results verify that our scheme can decrease energy consumption as well as end-to-end delay. The proposed scheme can also be easily adapted to other wireless networks, such as in medical and non-medical WBAN and security monitoring system.