Hop-to-Hop Congestion Feedback Mechanism for Sink Bottleneck Problem in WSNs

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a most promising method for future environmental observation. The problem of congestion in WSNs is significantly different from conventional ad-hoc networks and has not been studied to any great extent thus far. Congestion in sink bottleneck of WSNs not only causes packet loss, but also leads to excessive energy consumption. Therefore, congestion feedback and control of WSNs will improve wireless channel quality dramatically, reduce energy consumption and avoid starvation, as a result increase network efficiency. In this paper, we proposed a distributed congestion feedback algorithm innovatively named as DCCA to solve sink bottleneck problem for multi-hop WSNs, which uses queue based congestion level detection scheme in the MAC layer and then adopts hop-by-hop feedback notification scheme in the transport layer. Finally, whether forward or drop packet will be decided by each sensor node in the network layer. Therefore, the proposed DCCA is a cross-layer design philosophical approach.