GARUDA: Achieving Effective Reliability for Downstream Communication in Wireless Sensor Networks

There exist several applications of sensor networks where the reliability of data delivery can be critical. Although the redundancy inherent in a sensor network might increase the degree of reliability, it by no means can provide any guaranteed reliability semantics. In this paper, the authors consider the problem of reliable sink-to-sensors data delivery. They first identify several fundamental challenges that need to be addressed and are unique to the environment of wireless sensor networks. They, then propose a scalable framework for reliable downstream data delivery that is specifically designed to both address and leverage the characteristics of the wireless sensor networks while achieving the reliability in an efficient manner. Through ns2-based simulations, they evaluate the proposed framework.