CARTEE: congestion avoidance with reliable transport and energy efficiency for multimedia applications in wireless sensor networks

Reliable data transport is an essential requirement for many multimedia applications in wireless sensor networks. Actually, an efficient transport protocol for these applications must take into account not only reliability and energy consumption factors but also memory occupancy and data delivery delay. Recently, many research works have been conducted in this area, however the proposed protocols treat some of these aspects and neglect others. Contrarily, in this paper we present a novel transport solution designed to provide 100% reliability without making light of other factors. Through different mechanisms, we attempt to reach this objective with congestion avoidance and good performances in terms of energy consumption, delivery delay, and memory storage. The proposed protocol, called congestion avoidance with reliable transmission and energy efficiency (CARTEE), attains these goals through several mechanisms, namely: fixed sliding window transmission, alternative implicit/explicit acknowledgement, a new congestion detection technique, and distributed transmission rate adjustment. To evaluate the proposed protocol, we have conducted simulations using ns-3. The obtained results confirm the efficiency and scalability of CARTEE and demonstrate that it outperforms the recent proposed transport protocols in terms of reliability, congestion avoidance, data cache occupancy, and latency.