Reliability in Unidirectional WSNs

With the advent of IoT (Internet of Things), an increasing number of devices start exchanging information. This puts emphasis on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to facilitate the interaction with the environment in varied application scenarios such as, for example, building and home automation among others. In this context, a reliable communication is usually required, i.e., it is necessary to guarantee that packets arrive within a specified maximum delay or deadline. In addition, since nodes are usually battery-powered and deployed in large numbers, they must be cost-effective and economize on energy, which requires nodes to have a low complexity.

In this context, unidirectional communication, i.e., where nodes either send or receive data, seems to be an interesting solution. Since no elaborate feedback mechanisms such as carrier sensing, acknowledgments and retransmissions schemes are possible, complexity, costs, energy consumption and communication overhead are reduced in a considerable manner. On the other hand, however, packet loss becomes more likely making such networks strongly unreliable. To overcome this predicament, we work on  MAC (Medium Access Control) protocols such as, e.g., DEEP (DEtermistic dEpendable Protocol) and RARE (RAndom REaliable protocol). These consist in nodes transmitting their data as sequences of redundant packets with carefully selected or randomly generated inter-packet separations respectively, leading to robust transmission patterns that enable reliable communication.

In contrast to solutions from the literature, the proposed protocols do not pursue a best-effort approach, but rather provide an analytical framework to assess the performance (i.e., reliability, energy consumption, etc.) of the network. In addition, the proposed protocols are based on more general models that allow describing arbitrary node types with different deadlines and packet lengths leading to a provable higher performance.