An Energy Efficient Congestion Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

An efficient reliable sensor-to-sink data transport protocol will ensure that the sink can collect enough information and minimize energy consumption of data transport. It should be designed to adjust the reporting rates of sources and adapting to wireless communication conditions. We design a congestion control mechanism at the source which reacts based on the sum of the node weights at each node. In this scheme, each node passes its calculated weight upstream. Each node adds its current weight to that it received from a downstream node, and passes this information toward the upstream node. At the end, the source will receive the sum of all weight information from the corresponding downstream nodes and use the it for controlling rates. Each sensor node transmits the data with the adjusted rate. The sink node receives the time series for each sensor node. After collecting enough data, the sink node uses a clustering algorithm to partition sensor nodes according to the sending rates and similarity of data obtained. Then it sends out the cluster information to all sensor nodes and requires the sensor nodes within the same cluster to work alternatively to save energy. The nodes within a cluster adaptively enters into energy saving mode according to a random schedule. By simulation results, we show that our protocol achieves congestion control along with energy saving.