In wireless sensor networks, commonly used networking protocols may not necessarily function well due to the stringent requirements of such networks. A transport layer protocol for this environment must work well over shared wireless connections that are prone to packet errors. TCP’s burstiness due to its aggressiveness in probing for available capacity and multiplicative backoff in response to congestion yields a traffic profile that may not be suitable for wireless sensor networks.
This work investigates how LEDBAT, a delay-based less-than-best-effort protocol, would behave in a wireless sensor network. Although LEDBAT was designed to yield to TCP when sharing a bottleneck link, simulations showed that under certain conditions, LEDBAT obtains a fair share of wireless bandwidth, ensuring node throughput in WSN scenarios. More importantly, it is also able to provide a steadier flow than TCP even as the number of hops to its destination increases.