Passive acknowledgement is a protocol originally proposed for MANETs to detect link failures. It says,that a node must overhear the channel to check whether its neighbor transmitted the packet or not.
Wireless links are one of the primary performance-limiting factors in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In particular, link failures negatively influence the network performance, reliability, and availability in most cases. In WSNs, a link failure might result in the loss of the shortest path between a sensor node and the sink node; thus the data will have to be transmitted via a longer path, leading to longer transmission delay and increased energy consumption. Therefore, it is crucial to characterize the impact of different parameters, such as battery life-time, power consumption of sensor nodes, fading, and interference, on wireless links. WSNs using the shortest-path distance algorithm are typically more reliable than those using the shortest-path hop algorithm, but they typically consume more energy for communication.
You may find the following paper useful, in which authors have discussed the issue of passive acknowledgements in zigbee wireless sensor networks.
Sung, T. W., Wu, T. T., Yang, C. S., & Huang, Y. M. (2010). Reliable data broadcast for Zigbee wireless sensor networks. International journal on smart sensing and intelligent systems, 3(3), 504-520. http://www-ist.massey.ac.nz/s2is/issues/v3/n3/papers/paper11.pdf
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