A Robust Reliable Low-power High Throughput Data Collection Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

This paper presents a robust data gathering protocol for wireless sensor network applications that require high throughput, reliability, and low-power. Insofar as high throughput is concerned, TDMA is more suitable than CSMA. Efficient TDMA protocols require solid synchronization and more optimized time slot scheduling. Reliable data collection calls for end-to-end packet retransmission. Such factors hinder the implementation of a comprehensive data collection protocol. In this paper, a heuristic TDMA scheduling algorithm is provided to achieve optimized time slot scheduling with multi-channel communication. The combination of TDMA and multi-channel communication affords to sustain high throughput and low-power communication. In addition, this paper leverages constructive interference based flooding to provide robust synchronization and efficient downward communication. Therefore, we are able to associate constructive interference based flooding with packet retransmission to implement collection reliability. The proposed protocol is implemented on self-made sensor node with Contiki operating system. Experimental results in a deployed network consisting of 29 self-made sensor nodes show that the protocol is able to maintain lasting operation and provide throughput as high as 14.74 KByte/s with 100\% data collection.