A Framework for Congestion Control for Reliable Data Delivery in Wireless Sensor Networks

WSN congestion occurs when offered traffic load exceeds available capacity. It causes overall channel quality to degrade and drop rates to rise. Furthermore, redundant transmissions are always adopted to guarantee reliable data delivery, which may deteriorate congestion since they bring on more contention and in reverse hampers the reliability. In this paper, we propose a framework to avoid, detect and mitigate congestion effectively. In this framework, a congestion aware traffic allocation (COTA) is used in multipath routing to balance traffic around the whole network COTA uses some heuristic information to analyze the potential congestion region and avoid traversing these regions. A runtime traffic adjustment CODEM is presented to use accurate metrics to detect and mitigate congestion. Compared with previous works, our work can control congestion while achieving the desired reliability at the same time. Comprehensive simulations have validated the distinguished performance in several aspects of our framework.