Flush: A Reliable Bulk Transport Protocol for Multihop Wireless Networks

The authors present Flush, a reliable, high goodput bulk data transport protocol for wireless sensor networks. Flush provides end-to-end reliability, reduces transfer time, and adapts to time-varying network conditions. It achieves these properties using end-to-end acknowledgments, implicit snooping of control information, and a rate-control algorithm that operates at each hop along a flow. Using several real network topologies, they show that Flush closely tracks or exceeds the maximum goodput achievable by a hand-tuned but fixed rate for each hop over a wide range of path lengths and varying network conditions.