Reliable Multicasting with Implicit ACK and Indirect Recovery in Wireless Sensor Networks
Sung‐Hoon Kim, Hyun Jong Yang, Chang-Yun Park · 2008
As sensor networks are used in various and dynamic applications, the function of sink-to-sensors reliable multicasting such as for task reprogramming is newly required. NAK-based error recovery schemes have been proposed for energy efficient reliable multicasting. However, these schemes have incompleteness problems such as the last packet loss. This paper introduces an ACK-based error recovery scheme, RM2I(Reliable Multicast with Implicit ACK and Indirect Recovery). It utilizes wireless multicast advantage in which a packet may be delivered to all of its omni-directional neighbor nodes. When a sender overhears a packet which its receiver forwards to the next nodes, it may interpret it as an ACK from the receiver. We call it an Implicit ACK. In Indirect Recovery, when a node receives a packet from neighbor nodes which are not its direct upstream node, it saves and utilizes it for error recovery. Using NS-2 simulator, we have analyzed their effects. We have also compared RM2I with the NAK-based error recovery scheme. In results, RM2I shows comparable performances to the ideal NAK-based scheme, except where Implicit ACK and Indirect Recovery do not occur at the edges of the networks.