An Enhanced Reliability Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks using PSFQ

Abstract

There is a growing need to support reliable data communications in Sensor Networks that are capable of supporting new applications. To our knowledge, there has been little work on the design of reliable transport protocols for sensor networks. This is because, vast majority of sensor network applications do not require reliable data delivery. There are a number of challenges associated with the development of a reliable transport protocol for Sensor Networks. Pump Slowly, Fetch Quickly [PSFQ], is the first developed protocol to provide data reliability in sensor networks. PSFQ is a simple, scalable, and robust transport protocol that is customizable to meet the needs of emerging reliable data applications in sensor networks. In this paper, we demonstrate a new dimension of PSFQ as an effort to increase the protocol performance. Here a sensor node is allowed to buffer a sufficiently large amount of data into its buffer, thereby allowing simultaneous transmission of multiple packets. In order to allow a sensor node to hold more number of data we are providing additional buffer space for each node. This enables the node to hold more than one packet in its buffer; thereby a sensor node can transmit more than one packet simultaneously. By this we can get an improved transmission rate and reduced latency. This would also quicken the fetch operation. By more buffer space we can hold more packets for a reasonable amount of time, this will improve the availability of the packets, and hence the fetches are made faster.