INESC TEC researchers win Best Paper Award

Entitled "Partial Energy-Efficient Hop-by-Hop Retransmission in Wireless Sensor Networks", the paper proposes a new mechanism to retransmit packets (data) in wireless sensor networks. Most applications using these networks aim at minimising energy consumption in the nodes, and consequently increasing the network’s lifecycle. Because packet loss is frequent in these networks, it is necessary to implement retransmission mechanisms to deal with this problem. The mechanism proposed in this paper addresses the requirements imposed by these applications.

This work is innovative because it focuses on a mechanism that selects the packets to be transmitted based on their criticality. Highly critical packets will always be transmitted, while the remaining will be transmitted according to the status of the network, nodes or means of transmission. This way it is possible to achieve a compromise between the decrease in energy consumption and the delivery of critical messages.

Other than the UTM researchers, the paper was co-written with Daniel Costa (State University of Feira de Santana, Brazil) and Luiz Affonso Guedes (Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil).

The researchers mentioned in this article are associated with the following partner institutions: INESC Porto and FEUP.