Packet-in-Packet: Concatenation with Concurrent Transmission for Data Collection in Low-Power Wireless Sensor Networks

Concurrent transmission, a novel communication paradigm, has been shown to effectively achieve reliable and energy-efficient flooding in low-power wireless networks. With multiple nodes exploiting a receive-and-forward scheme, this technique works effectively in flooding-based networks, i.e., in one-to-many scenarios. However, application-level scheduling has to be introduced for data collection in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we propose Packet-in-Packet (PiP), an energy-efficient paradigm requiring no application-level scheduling for timely data collection in low-power WSNs. PiP builds on concurrent transmissions, exploiting constructive interference and the capture effect to achieve high reliability and low latency. Moreover, PiP uses a packet concatenation capability to gather single-hop information in a best-effort manner. As a result, PiP significantly reduces collection time. We further compare PiP with a state-of-the-art protocol by extensive experiments in a 30-node FlockLab testbed. Experimental results show that PiP highly reduces collection time (i.e., rounds) and achieves good performance in terms of high reliability of approximately 98.7% and high energy efficiency in all experimental scenarios of the real-world testbed.