Protocol thoughts

As explained in my previous post, i will look for a way to push information into my monitoring system. I have not yet decided which protocol and format to use.

There are at least two protocol layers you have to care about: The application layer and the transport layer. While the application layer carries the payload data like sensor readings or actor commands, the transportation layers job is to ensure a correct transmission of that data.

For the application layer,  i thought about using something like XML or JSON. While these "full-grown" standard protocols offer the possibility to use the hole bunch of development tools and libraries, they add a lot of processing and transmission overhead. When thinking of wireless sensor networks, you always have to keep in mind the low bandwith of their connection and their sometimes very limited energy ressources. It would be cool to have a sensor node running of a mini solar panel for example. For this reason, i currently prefer a more simple binary protocol that just carries the data needed. 

Same thoughts apply to the transportation layer. First thing that came to my mind was "hey, lets just use TCP/IP". Cool things about IP and TCP are: it's

• stable
• provides a secure transportation layer
• is easy to program with all programming languages (standard sockets)
• easy to add a encryption layer and firewalling
• and you got big pile of standard debug, development and monitor solutions for it

so at first i thought it would be the perfect solution for my wireless nodes. But there are a number of disadvantages when using TCP/IP.

First: Overhead. Both in transport data volume and processing efford. There is a lot of information involved that is needed to keep the internet running - e.g. routable addresses

Second disadvantage is: TCP tries to ensure that all data send to the remote receiver gets submitted, using various tricks like ACKs, sequence numbers, the three-way-handshake, retransmissions, growing timeouts and congestion control. When you are transmitting data from a sensor network this does not always make sense. While some events should be transmitted with high security (like "the mailbox was filled" or "open the garage door") some other just get outdated too fast. When you transmit a temperature reading every 5 seconds or so, it just makes no sense to try to resubmit a lost transmission over and over again, as there might be a new sensor reading while the last one still is not transmitted. You better just try to submit it for a few times, and if that does not work, you just wait for the next reading and try again. Its sometime no problem to loose readings, its not critical.