Energy Saving and Reliability in Wireless Sensor Networks Using a CRT-based Packet Splitting Algorithm

In a previous paper a novel forwarding scheme for wireless sensor networks has been proposed by the same authors [3]. The authors showed that the proposed technique, mainly based on the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT), outperformed more traditional approaches in terms of both energy efficiency and fair distribution of energy consumption. Furthermore, only few changes to the commonly used forwarding schemes are needed for its implementation. However, although the advantages of the method were clear, all reported results were only empirical and obtained through simulations on ideal sensor networks. In this paper some analytical results regarding the proposed method are introduced and it is shown how to extend the proposed forwarding method on a more realistic wireless network where unreliable erasure channels are considered. Furthermore, a trade-off between reliability and energy saving is investigated.