Reliable transport for wireless sensor and actor networks

Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) are used for monitoring the physical world, processing data, making decisions and performing appropriate actions. Reliable transport of information in these networks is necessary for the correctness of an appropriate action, for obtaining the exact picture of phenomenon and for updating the modules of sensor nodes.A scalable, energy-aware and flexible transport solution for WSANs is presented in this study. The proposed transport solution is divided into two major parts sensors-to-actors and actor-to-sensors reliable transport. In order to fulfill different reliability requirements of events, the sensors-to-actors transport is further sub-divided into different transport modes; simple, fair, prioritized and real-time.Since the sudden impulse of event information from the sensors to the actor results in congestion, a novel congestion control scheme based on packet delivery time and buffer size of nodes is also presented in this study. In order to decrease the affect of interference, a novel schedule based packet forwarding scheme is introduced at the transport layer for orderly delivery of event packets to underlying layers. The actor to sensors reliable transport is aimed to provide successful transport of all data packets from the source to sensor nodes. In this study it is shown that, the rate at which lost packets should be recovered depends on the arrangement of nodes in the network.