On Improving the Reliability of Packet Delivery in Dense Wireless Sensor Networks

—Wireless sensor networks (WSN) built using current Berkeley Mica motes exhibit low reliability for packet delivery. There is anecdotal evidence of poor packet delivery rates from several field trials of WSN deployment. All-to-one communication pattern is a dominant one in many such deployments. As we scale up the size of the network and the traffic density in this communication pattern, improving the reliability of packet delivery performance becomes very important. This study is aimed at two things. Firstly, it aims to understand the factors limiting reliable packet delivery for all-to-one communication pattern in dense wireless sensor networks. Secondly, it aims to suggest enhancements to well-known protocols that may help boost the performance to acceptable levels. We first postulate the potential reasons hampering packet delivery rates with current CSMA-based MAC layer used by the radios deployed in WSN. We then propose a set of enhancements that are aimed to mitigate the ill...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ICCCN
• Authors: JunSuk Shin, Umakishore Ramachandran, Mostafa H. Ammar
• Keywords: ICCCN 2007, Packet Delivery, Packet Delivery Performance, Packet Delivery Rates