Energy-efficient tracking of continuous objects such as fluids, gases, and wild fires is one of the important challenging issues in wireless sensor networks. Many studies have focused on electing fewer nodes to report the boundary information of continuous objects for energy saving. However, this approach of using few reporting packets is very sensitive to packet loss. Many applications based on continuous objects tracking require timely and precise boundary information due to the danger posed by the objects. When transmission of reporting packets fails, applications are unable to track the boundary reliably and a delay is imposed to recover. The transmission failure can fatally degrade application performance. Thus, it is necessary to consider just-in-time recovery for reliable continuous object tracking. Nevertheless, most schemes did not consider the reliable tracking to handle the situation that packet loss happen. Recently, a scheme called I-COD with retransmission was proposed to recover lost packets but it leads to increasing both the energy consumption and the tracking latency owing to the retransmission. Thus, we propose a reliable tracking scheme that uses fast recovery with the redundant boundary information to track continuous objects in real-time and energy-efficiently. In the proposed scheme, neighbor nodes of boundary nodes gather the boundary information in duplicate and report the redundant boundary information. Then the sink node can recover the lost packets fast by using the redundant boundary information. The proposed scheme provides the reliable tracking with low latency and no retransmissions. In addition, the proposed scheme saves the energy by electing fewer nodes to report the boundary information and performing the recovery without retransmissions. Our simulation results show that the proposed scheme provides the energy-efficient and reliable tracking in real-time for the continuous objects.

It has been a very important issue to evaluate the performance of transmission control protocol (TCP), and the importance is still growing up because TCP will be deployed more widely in future wireless as well as wireline networks. It is also the reason why there have been a lot of efforts to analyze TCP performance more accurately. Most of these works are focusing on overall TCP end-to-end throughput that is defined as the number of bytes transmitted for a given time period. Even though each TCP's fast recovery strategy should be considered in computation of the exact time period, it has not been considered sufficiently in the existing models. That is, for more detailed performance analysis of a TCP implementation, the fast recovery latency during which lost packets are retransmitted should be considered with its relevant strategy. In this paper, we extend the existing models in order to capture TCP's loss recovery behaviors in detail. On the basis of the model, the loss recovery latency of three TCP implementations can be derived with considering the number of retransmitted packets. In particular, the proposed model differentiates the loss recovery performance of TCP using selective acknowledgement (SACK) option from TCP NewReno. We also verify that the proposed model reflects the precise latency of each TCP's loss recovery by simulations.