Energy and Time Trade-Offs in Duplicate Packet Transmission

Sensor and ad hoc networks are designed to function in uncertain environments. The transmission medium, the possible mobility and unreliability of nodes, and possible malicious interventions by adversaries, create significant uncertainty and increase the effective transmission delays, which in turn may be mitigated by appropriate protocols. One obvious approach to mitigating uncertainty is to forward information over multiple independent paths, but this means of reducing overall unreliability comes at the cost of increased energy consumption as well as the creating of congestion and possible conflicts and packet collisions.