A Reliable and Energy Efficient Transport Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), an ideal transport layer needs to support reliable message delivery and provide congestion control in an efficient manner in order to extend the lifetime of a WSN. The main use of transport protocol in WSN is to overcome the congestion and the reliability with energy efficiency. In this paper, we develop a reliable and energy efficient transport protocol (REETP), which mainly focuses on the reliability and energy efficiency. Our proposed protocol consist of an Efficient Node Selection Algorithm to determine a set of efficient nodes called E-Nodes which form a near optimal coverage set with largest area and highest residual energy level. The key idea of REETP is to transfer encoded packets using LT codes from the source to the sink block by block and each block is forwarded to an E-node. After receiving encoded packets, the E-node tries to reconstruct the original data packets and it encodes the original data packets again and relays them to the next E-node until it reaches the sink. By simulation results, we show that our proposed protocol has more packet delivery ratio with reduced packet loss and energy consumption.