Energy-Efficient and Reliable Transport Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks: State-of-Art

New wireless sensor network applications (e.g., military surveillance) require higher reliability than a simple best effort service could provide. Classical reliable transport protocols like Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) are not well suited for wireless sensor networks due to both the characteristics of the network nodes (low computing power, strong energy constraints) and those of the main applications running on those nodes (low data rates). Recent researches present new transport protocols for wireless sensor networks providing various type of reliability and using new mechanisms for loss detection and recovery, and congestion control. This paper presents a survey on reliable transport protocol for WSNs.