A New Transport Layer Sensor Network Protocol

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are becoming a viable tool for many monitoring applications. These applications may be of critical nature where the transportation of the information of events from the region of interest to some base station or sink is crucial, where the data loss cannot be tolerated. In the other direction, the information (for the purpose of control or management) sent from the base station to the sensor nodes can be very sensitive to loss as well. For example, in re-tasking sensors nodes, sending a program image to them is challenging. A loss of a single message, associated with the program code, would leave the image useless and the whole re-tasking process would fail. To deal with this issue, a reliable transport protocol is needed that can guarantee the delivery of packets and can cater to the special needs and characteristics of WSN. In this paper, we discuss the importance and the need of the transport layer protocol for wireless sensor networks and review some existing work. We also propose to implement the transport layer protocol on two-tiered wireless sensor network, a clustering-based architecture where the cluster-heads, more powerful in resources and features, can deal with the responsibilities of a transport layer protocol, and can provide the reliability in data transmission