Bursty Traffic over Bursty Links
Muhammad H Alizai, Olaf Landsiedel, Jó A Bitsch Link, Stefan Goetz, and Klaus Wehrle (RWTH)
SenSys 2009
Bo YU

It is a system paper working on the routing protocols in WSN, the idea behind it is very simple but the experiments are thorough.
Protocols in WSN aim to establish a routing tree rooted at base station.
There exists some bursty links — links temporarily stable — in WSN.
We may use these links to transmit data with less hops. The paper builds a Short-Term Link Estimator.

The algorithm comprised 4 steps:
1. Reliability:
If one node overhears another node several times, we guess there are temporarily reliable link.
2. Feasibility:
The overhearing node queries the routing protocols and
find the overhearing packet could be transmitted by this node faster(i.e. ),
then the bursty link is feasible
3. Announcement:
It informs the sender-node that it can use the bursty link to transmit data faster
4. Unavaibility
Once failure in receiving/transmitting data, the link is announced unavailable.
We use ETX metric — the number of retransimission required to a successful transmission — to measure the quality of a link.