ACR: Active Collision Recovery in Dense Wireless Sensor Networks

Packet collision causes packet loss and wastes resources in wireless networks. It becomes even worse in dense WSNs, due to burst-traffic and congestion around sinks. In this paper, the authors propose a novel protocol to recover collided packets. The experiments on a testbed reveal that collisions between long packets and short packets cause a partial error pattern on collided packets, which can be used for efficient recovery. They give a theoretical analysis that demonstrates that combining such collision recovery with CSMA protocols achieves a significant performance improvement.