Edinburgh Napier University

  Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been the preferred choice for the design and deployment of next generation monitoring and control systems [1]. In these networks, the sensor nodes forward their sensed data towards a centralized base station. The neighboring nodes frequently sense correlated data and forward towards the base station, using disjoints multiple paths [2]. As a result, the area around the base station becomes congested with all the traffic converging towards it. Apart from packet lost due to congestion, a significant number of packets are lost due to interference, packet collision, node failure and transmission errors [3]. For a successful monitoring of the deployed environment, the critical data collected by the sensor nodes need to be reliably and effectively delivered to the base station. Given the error-prone nature of the wireless links, ensuring reliable transmission of data from resource-constrained sensor nodes towards the base station continues to be one of the major challenges in the field of WSNs [4]. Retransmission and redundancy are classified as the two main approaches to achieve data transmission reliability in WSNs. However, retransmission and redundancy techniques perform better when using hop-by-hop transmission approach as compared to end-to-end transmission. Using hop-by-hop approach introduces in-node processing overhead and incurs high overall latency in reporting data to the base station. As a result, hybrid approaches need to be adopted to