DAPR: Delay-Aware Priority Based Routing Scheme to Alleviate Congestion in Wireless Sensor Networks

The intensive traffic loads and high data rate in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) can cause congestion and have negative impact on the performance such as increased delay and energy consumption by sensor nodes. Moreover, the information provided by sensors may have different importance. The data packets which have more priority should reach sink nodes with reduced delay compared to low priority traffic. In this paper, we propose a delay-aware priority based routing scheme, called DAPR to alleviate congestion in wireless sensor networks. Our proposed mechanism uses queuing model at each sensor node which differentiates high-priority (HP) and low-priority (LP) data packets and transmits them in different way so that HP packets can be reached at sink nodes with reduced delay compared to LP packets. DAPR uses multipath routing technique which helps to alleviate congestion at certain places in the network, balances the load of traffic across several sensor nodes, and maximizes the network lifetime by reducing the energy consumption by sensor nodes. Simulation results show that our protocol achieves lower average end-to-end delay, more energy savings by sensor nodes, and less sensitive due to the impact of node failure than EQSR and MCMP protocols.