A Data Transmission Mechanism for Survivable Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), packets being sent over the transmission channel could get lost or corrupted due to factors such as channel noises, interferences, and node failures. Using the traditional retransmission mechanism to recover the lost/erroneous packets is costly or even impossible for WSN because sensor nodes are severely resource constrained and data transmission is the most energy intensive activity in WSN. An alternative approach is to apply forward error correcting (FEC) codes to achieve reliable data transmission. Nevertheless, FEC mechanisms do not provide security. To overcome this problem, an integrated mechanism has been proposed that systematically combines Reed-Solomon FEC codes and multiple versions of cryptographic algorithms to achieve both reliable and secure data transmission, leading to survivable WSN. In this paper, queuing modeling is applied to evaluate the performance of the integrated data transmission mechanism, and several case studies are performed to illustrate the application of the mechanism.