Experiments with Reliable Data Delivery in Wireless Sensor Networks

The increasing complexity of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) applications require simple, yet reliable, underlying networking mechanisms. In this paper, we describe the experiments performed to establish the real challenges and sources of errors for the reliable data delivery problem. We also discuss several implementation solutions and try to establish the issues that should be taken into account in the design phase. The results are obtained by field measurements, therefore we consider them relevant and useful. Our work relies on tight interaction among transport, routing and medium access layers, with the overall goal of achieving energy efficiency through cross-layer optimizations.