Quality-Based Event Reliability Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Quantity-based event reliability protocols have been proposed for reliable event detection in wireless sensor networks. They support the event reliability by achieving the desired number of data packets successfully transmitted from sensor nodes sensing an event to a sink by controlling the transport process. However, since many data collisions and buffer overflows frequently happen due to data congestions on limited data delivery paths from an event to a sink, the quantity-based event reliability protocols are hard to achieve the desired number due to lost data packets. Thus, this letter proposes a Quality-basect Event Reliability Protocol (QERP) utilizing a property that the data packets from sensor nodes have different Contribution Degree (CD) values for event detection according to their environmental conditions. QERP selects sensor nodes to forward their data packets according to CD, and differentially transports the data packets by CD-based buffer management and load balancing.