A congestion control scheme for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSN), nodes have very limited power due to hardware constraints. Packet losses and retransmissions resulting from congestion cost precious energy and shorten the lifetime of sensor nodes. This problem motivates the need for congestion control mechanisms in WSN. In this thesis, an observation of multiple non-empty queues in sensor networks is first reported. Other aspects affected by congestion like queue length, delay and packet loss are also studied. The simulation results show that the number of occupied queues along a path can be used to detect congestion. Based on the above result, a congestion control scheme for the transport layer is proposed in this thesis. It is composed of three parts: (i) congestion detection by tracking the number of non-empty queues; (ii) On-demand midway non-binary explicit congestion notification (CN) feedback; and (iii) Adaptive rate control based on additive increase and multiplicative decrease (AIMD). This scheme has been implemented in ns2. Extensive simulations have been conducted to evaluate it. Results show that it works well in mitigating and avoiding congestion and achieves good performance in terms of energy dissipation, latency and transmission effciency.