A low-overhead energy-efficient ARQ protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a typical kind of low-power and lossy network, in where ARQ (Automatic Repeat reQuest) schemes are often used to improve packets reliability. However, the ARQ related packets may incur significant load and consume more energy. This paper proposes a novel energy efficient ARQ protocol called ARQ+, which uses the nearest-first scheme and NAK aggregation scheme to reduce the amount and transmission hops of the ARQ related packets. Consequently, the energy consumption is significantly decreased. Theoretical analyses of ARQ+ on energy consumption, packet arrive ratio and latency are provided. Performance improvement of ARQ+ is validated by extensive simulations. They both show that ARQ+ has satisfactory energy efficiency, good packets arriving ratio and reasonable average packet delay comparing to traditional ARQ schemes.