RESIDENT: a reliable residue number system-based data transmission mechanism for wireless sensor networks

Retransmission is the most common data transmission mechanism in wireless sensor networks, and can improve data transmission reliability via the acknowledgement mechanism. However, the simple acknowledgement retransmission is associated with some negative factors such as data delay, low throughput among others. To overcome the shortcomings of the retransmission mechanism, redundancy coding is introduced to wireless communications, which has been widely applied in 4G communication. Unfortunately, not all redundant erasure codes are suitable for wireless sensor networks, as nodes’ energy, processing power, and storage capacity are all limited. Moreover, we also need to consider data transmission delay. Therefore, to improve data transmission reliability, we must take into account the complexity of algorithm, data transmission delay, node energy consumption, and other factors. In this article, we propose a REliable reSIDuE number system-based data transmission mechanism (RESIDENT) for WSNs, which can improve data transmission reliability via hybrid automatic repeat requests in hop-by-hop scenarios. In order to decrease the complexity of decoding, we present our algorithm and the proof of correctness, and report the performance using extensive set of simulation experiments. Our simulation results show that RESIDENT exhibits a good performance when compared to the previous studies, not only in terms of reliable data transmission, but also in end-to-end delay and energy consumption.