Analytical Evaluation of Retransmission Schemes in Wireless Sensor Networks

Retransmission has been adopted as one of the most popular schemes for improving transmission reliability in wireless sensor networks. Many previous works have been done on reliable transmission issues in experimental ways, however, there is still a lack of analytical techniques to evaluate these solutions. Based on the traffic model, service model and energy model, the authors propose an analytical method to analyze the delay and energy metrics of two categories of retransmission schemes: Hop-By-Hop retransmission (HBH) and End-To-End retransmission (ETE). With the experiment results, the maximum packet transfer delay and energy efficiency of these two schemes are compared in several scenarios. Moreover, the analytical results of transfer delay are validated through simulations.