Robcast: a Reliable Mac Layer Protocol for Broadcast in Wireless Sensor Networks

Real-world experiments [1, 2] have shown that wireless sensor networks exhibit certain traffic patterns where events of interest have been noticed to cause a burst of activity at nodes propagating the information over the network. However, bursts of activity from multiple transmitters in a neighborhood results in energy wastage due to collisions. Current protocols use RTS-CTS handshakes to avoid collisions and alleviate the hidden terminal problem. However such a solution is neither efficient nor reliable for WSNs. Thus, motivated by the goal of reliable data transmission using minimum power, we propose RoBcast a round based solution for reliably broadcasting data over a single-hop using information from detected collisions. The link-level reliability of RoBcast can form the building block upon which future applications and protocols can be designed for WSNs.