Predictive Retransmissions for Intermittently Connected Sensor Networks with Transmission Diversity

Abstract

Batteryless wireless sensor networks that rely on energy harvested from the environment often exhibit random power outages due to limitations of energy resources, which give rise to intermittent connectivity and long transmission delays. To improve the delay performance in such networks, we consider a design strategy that uses predictive retransmissions to maximize the probability of success for each transmission. This is applied to two different transmission diversity schemes: cooperative relaying over unicast routes and opportunistic routing. Performance evaluations from theoretical models and simulations are presented that show that significant gains can be achieved using the proposed approach in such networks.