Adaptive Transmission Power Control for Reliable Data Forwarding in Sensor Based Networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), many applications require a high reliability for the sensing data forwarding to sink. Due to the lossy nature of wireless channels, achieving reliable communication through multihop forwarding can be very challenging. Broadcast technology is an effective way to improve the communication reliability so that the data can be received by multiple receiver nodes. As long as the data of any one of the receiver nodes is transmitted to the sink, the data can be transmitted successfully. In this paper, a cross‐layer optimization protocol named Adaptive transmission Power control based Reliable data Forwarding (APRF) scheme by using broadcast technology is proposed to improve the reliability of network and reduce communication delay. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) for general data aggregation sensor networks, through the theoretical analysis, the energy consumption characteristics of the network are obtained. (2) According to the case that the energy consumption of near‐sink area is high and that in far‐sink area is low, a cross‐layer optimization method is adopted, which can effectively improve the data communication by increasing the transmission power of the remaining energy nodes. (3) Since the reliability of communication is improved by increasing the transmission power of the node, the number of retransmissions of the data packet is reduced, so that the delay of the packet reaching the sink node is reduced. The theoretical and experimental results show that, applying APRF scheme under initial transmission power of 0 dBm, although the lifetime dropped by 13.77%, delay could be reduced by 40.37%, network reliability could be reduced by 10.08%, and volume of data arriving at sink increased by 10.08% compared with retransmission‐only mechanism.