An Energy Efficient Data Transfer Mechanism for Wireless Sensor Network

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are generally energy and resource constrained. In most WSN applications the traffic pattern is from sensor-to-sink and for effective utilization of available resources in network data aggregation is employed. If a data packet is lost due to node failure or collision the correlated information content by data packets is lost. Existing protocols that provide reliable data transfer for sensor-to-sink traffic are either not energy efficient or they provide reliability at the event level. Energy efficiency can be improved by employing proper duty cycle values. By extending the concept of monitors the proposed protocol provides packet level reliability and improves the energy efficiency by employing duty cycles. To further decrease the energy consumption only a subset of nodes is chosen as active nodes to transfer the data. The performance of the proposed protocol is evaluated using Matlab. Results show that protocol has significant improvement in terms of energy saving, throughput and packet delivery ratio.