Adaptive Burst Transmission Scheme for WSNs
Zeeshan Ansar, Waltenegus Dargie · 2017
Recently, bulk-data or burst transmission has been the focus of research in wireless sensor networks. The aim is to benefit applications which require high throughput but small scale deployment. Healthcare applications and applications which are intended to support independent living for the elderly are typical examples. The main idea is to exclusively provide the channel for one transmitter only until it has transferred all of the packets it has accumulated in the buffer. This exclusive use avoids aimless contention and significantly reduces packet transmission latency by dispensing with repeated clear channel assessment, random back-off, and the transmission of RTS and CTS packets for every single packet. Existing or proposed MAC protocols supporting bulk-data transmission, however, do not react well to link quality fluctuation, since nodes make repeated attempt to retransmit lost packets even when the statistics of received packets suggests that the channel is still bad or packet transmission will be deferred arbitrarily even though packet loss is an isolated and uncorrelated occurrence. In this paper, we address these issues and estimate the duration of good and bad links from the statistics of received ACK packets. Moreover, we provide a MAC layer solution to enable the coexistence of multiple transmitters during bulk-data transfer.