Route Aware Predictive Congestion Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Congestion in wireless sensor networks (WSN) may lead to packet losses or delayed delivery of important information rendering the WSN-based monitoring or control system useless. In this paper a routing-aware predictive congestion control (RPCC) yet decentralized scheme for WSN is presented that uses a combination of a hop by hop congestion control mechanism to maintain desired level of buffer occupancy, and a dynamic routing scheme that works in concert with the congestion control mechanism to forward the packets through less congested nodes. The proposed adaptive approach restricts the incoming traffic thus preventing buffer overflow while maintaining the rate through an adaptive back-off interval selection scheme. In addition, the optimal routing scheme diverts traffic from congested nodes through alternative paths in order to balance the load in the network, alleviating congestion. This load balancing of the routes will even out the congestion level throughout the network thus increasing throughput and reducing end to end delay. Closed-loop stability of the proposed hop-by-hop congestion control is demonstrated by using the Lyapunov-based approach. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme results in reduced end-to-end delays.