LOFT: A Latency-Oriented Fault Tolerant Transport Protocol for Wireless Sensor-Actuator Networks

Wireless sensor-actuator networks, or WSANs, refer to a group of sensors and actuators which collect data from the environment and perform application-specific actions in response. To act responsively and accurately, an efficient and reliable data transport protocol is crucial for the sensors to inform the actuators about the environmental events. Unfortunately, the low-power multi-hop communications in WSANs are inherently unreliable; the frequent sensor and link failures as well as the excessive delays due to congestion further aggravate the problem. In this paper, the authors propose a latency-oriented fault tolerant data transport protocol in WSANs.