Hop-by-Hop TCP for Sensor Networks

Communication links in a sensor network are unstable such that running conventional TCP protocol over a high loss rate sensor networks will suffer from severe performance degradation. To handle a packet loss, conventional TCP retransmits the lost packet from its source. However, when error rate is high, it may have difficulty to deliver a packet to its destination. Considering that most applications on a sensor network prefer faster and reliable packet delivery to higher throughput, this paper proposes to use the Hop-by-Hop TCP protocol for sensor networks aiming to accelerate reliable packet delivery.