Recent studies have shown that in realistic wireless sensor network environments links are extremely unreliable. To recover from corrupted packets, most routing schemes with an assumption of ideal radio environments use a retransmission mechanism, which may cause unnecessary retransmissions. Therefore, guaranteeing energy-efficient reliable data transmission is a fundamental routing issue in wireless sensor networks. However, it is not encouraged to propose a new reliable routing scheme in the sense that every existing routing scheme cannot be replaced with the new one. This paper proposes a Distributed and Reliable Data Transmission (DRDT) scheme with a goal to efficiently guarantee reliable data transmission. In particular, this is based on a pluggable modular approach so that it can be extended to existing routing schemes. DRDT offers reliable data transmission using neighbor nodes, i.e., helper nodes. A helper node is selected among the neighbor nodes of the receiver node which overhear the data packet in a distributed manner. DRDT effectively reduces the number of retransmissions by delegating the retransmission task from the sender node to the helper node that has higher link quality to the receiver node when the data packet reception fails due to the low link quality between the sender and the receiver nodes. Comprehensive simulation results show that DRDT improves end-to-end transmission cost by up to about 45% and reduces its delay by about 40% compared to existing schemes.
Keywords: cooperative operation; energy-efficiency; modular approach; reliable data transmission; wireless sensor networks.