An Efficient Retransmission Strategy for Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper introduces a new strategy for data gathering in wireless sensor networks that takes into account the need for both energy saving and for a reasonable tradeoff between robustness and efficiency. The proposed algorithm implements an efficient strategy for retransmission of lost packets by discovering alternative routes and making clever use of multiple paths when necessary; in order to do that we use duplicate and order insensitive aggregation functions, and by taking advantage of some intrinsic characteristics of the wireless sensor networks, we exploit implicit acknowledgment of reception and smart caching of the data.