RP2PT: A reliable point-to-point transport protocol for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), due to the event-driven features, congestion may occur unpredictably. Packet losses or errors may lead to fatal failure in certain applications (e.g., network program updating). Therefore, reliability of data transmission plays an important role in WSNs. And also, energy efficiency is a critical issue in WSNs because of its restricted power supply. In this paper, taking reliability and energy efficiency into account, we propose a reliable point-to-point transport protocol (RP2PT) for WSNs. In RP2PT, a virtual circuit between the source nodes and the sink is established and reliability is guaranteed by local caching and local retransmission. Theoretical analysis and simulation experiments show that RP2PT can provide better performance than other protocols in terms of the number of retransmitted packets, the amount of transmitted packets, and the amount of ACKs.