An Error Recovery Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, the importance of transporting data correctly with reliability is increasing gradually along with the need to support communications between the nodes and sink. Data flow from the sink to the nodes requires reliability for control or management that is very sensitive and intolerant of error; however, data flow from the nodes to the sink is relatively tolerant. In this paper, with emphasis on the data flow from the sink to the nodes, we propose a mechanism that considers accurate transport with reliability hop-by-hop. During the process of sending the data, if errors occur or data is missing, the proposed mechanism supports error recovery using a fixed window with selective acknowledgment. In addition, this mechanism supports congestion control depending on the buffer condition. Through the simulation, we show that this mechanism is accurate, reliable, and proper for transport in wireless sensor networks.