Performance evaluation of the DAlPaS congestion control algorithm in wireless sensor networks

As wireless sensor networks are evolving to applications where high load demands dominate and time is considered critical, congestion remains a serious problem that has to be effectively and efficiently tackled. Especially in critical applications such as industrial or aviation control, congestion occurrence, in any instance of the network´s operation, is capable of ruining the mission of the network. Congestion is usually controlled by reducing the rate with which sources are injecting data in the network (“traffic control”). Although this method is effective in many cases, it is not acceptable for applications that need all the produced data to be received by sink. Besides the “traffic control” method, “resource control” is also used for congestion mitigation. Algorithms that employ the “resource control” method employ alternative paths toward the sink. In this work, through analysis and simulations, we evaluate the performance of Dynamic Alternative Path Selection Algorithm (DAlPaS) a congestion control algorithm that employs alternative paths for the transmission of excess packets from the source(s) to the sink(s). The DAlPaS algorithm is evaluated against two other algorithms that also employ “resource control” (TARA and HTAP) and against an algorithm that employs the “traffic control” method (SenTCP), in addition to the no congestion control case (no CC).