Energy efficient transport protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Reliable transport protocols such as TCP are tuned to perform well in traditional networks where packet losses occur mostly because of congestion. Many applications of wireless sensor networks are useful only when connected to an external network. Previous research on transport layer protocols for sensor networks has focused on designing protocols specifically targeted for sensor networks. The deployment of TCP/IP in sensor networks would, however, enable direct connection between the sensor network and external TCP/IP networks. In this paper we focus on the performance of TCP in the context of wireless sensor networks. TCP is known to exhibit poor performance in wireless environments, both in terms of throughput and energy efficiency. To overcome these problems we introduce a mechanism called TCP segment caching .We show by simulation that TCP segment caching significantly improves TCP performance so that TCP can be useful even in wireless sensor networks.