Single path or multipath stochastic reliability in Wireless Sensor Networks

In Wireless Sensor Networks, it has been proved that the reliable transmission protocols sending redundant packets to the upstream neighbor hop-by-hop have advantage on energy efficiency compared with those using end-to-end error recovery and control scheme. While transmitting the redundant packets over error prone wireless links, there are two different ways could be used, which are single path and multipath respectively. In this paper, we proposed a comprehensive study on the energy efficiency constrained with desired reliability for all these approaches. A finite state Markov Chain model and hidden Markov model combined theoretical analysis method is presented to evaluate and compare the performance of these delivery processes. Our analysis indicates that when the packet loss rate of the wireless channel is relatively low, the single path scheme reveal better energy efficiency than the multipath one. However, the performance of single path scheme deteriorates rapidly with decreasing of the channel quality. When the bit error rate of the channel passes through a certain threshold, the multipath scheme will come to be the most energy efficient one.