Our previous study comparing analytically a comprehensive set of reliable data streaming protocols has shown that an hybrid protocol comprising stop-and-wait hop-by-hop ARQ with implicit ACK (SW HBH iACK ARQ) and event-to-sink reliable transport (ESRT) is the best energy-efficient generic transport protocol for wireless sensor networks. The implementation of this hybrid protocol requires better understanding of when to switch between ESRT and SW HBH iACK ARQ, how to set the retransmission timeout and how to adapt the protocol parameters to the link qualities. Theses questions are studied by field experiments and simulation and the findings are reported in this paper.