Soft Checksum Method for Error-tolerant Multi-hop Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks

Packet transmission in a wireless sensor network requires all bits of each packet to be delivered without error, so the packet should be retransmitted until all the bit sequences have been successfully delivered. Current transmission techniques consume a lot of energy due to unnecessary retransmission of packets containing error-tolerant data even if some bits such as part of images are corrupted. In this paper, we propose a scheme that accommodates some bits of error-tolerant data without resorting to retransmission even if those bits are damaged. It operates by adding a small amount of extra information to a transmitting packet, which classifies the area of the packet requiring high reliability and uses a checksum to protect that area. Through performance evaluation, we confirm that our scheme outperforms the baseline in terms of transmission efficiency.