CAM: Congestion Avoidance and Mitigation in Wireless Sensor Networks

Successful event detection in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) requires reliability and timeliness. When an event occurs, the base station (BS) is particularly interested about reliable and timely collection of data sent by the nodes close to the event, and the data sent by other nodes have little importance. In this paper, we propose Congestion Avoidance and Mitigation (CAM) protocol that performs the function of a routing protocol as well as the function of a transport protocol. During routing, it avoids congestion by avoiding congested routes. It also mitigates congestion by utilizing an accurate data-rate adjustment when congestion occurs. Experimental results show that CAM is capable of avoiding and mitigating congestion effectively, and performs better than similar known techniques in terms of reliable and timely event detection.