Concurrent Transmission-based Packet Concatenation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Concurrent transmission, a novel communication paradigm, has been shown to effectively achieve reliable and energy-efficient flooding in low-power wireless networks. With multiple nodes exploiting a receive-and-forward scheme, this technique works effectively in one-to-many scenarios. However, application-level scheduling has to be introduced for data collection applications. In this paper, we propose Packet-in-Packet (PiP), an energy-efficient paradigm requiring no application-level scheduling for timely data collection in low-power wireless sensor networks. PiP builds on concurrent transmissions, exploiting constructive interference and the capture effect to achieve high reliability, low latency, and high energy efficiency. Moreover, PiP uses a packet concatenation capability to gather single-hop information in a best-effort manner. Experimental results show that PiP achieves high reliability in all experimental scenarios of a real-world testbed.