Congestion controlled adaptive routing in wireless sensor network

Control of congestion in case of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is a very crucial area of interest, where an increase in data transmission by sensor nodes results in a proportionately smaller increase, or even a reduction in throughput. Therefore, more sophisticated techniques are required to combat with network congestion. Various constrained resources of the WSN are to be taken into account while devising such mechanisms. Different approaches for congestion detection and avoidance have been introduced in the past few years. The traditional flooding and gossiping algorithm can cause loss of data. To tackle some of the issues, this paper presents a novel approach for congestion control based dynamic routing. In the proposed work, whenever the packet traversal experiences the congestion, an alternate path is computed to reroute the packets on the new path. The proposed work has three phases namely congestion detection, alternate path computation and re-routing the packets on new path. Congestion in the path can be detected based on the free space available in the buffer. Alternate path is computed based on available bandwidth, hop distance and residual energy on the path. This work is simulated using C for its effectiveness. Some of the performance parameters considered in this work are route discovery time, congestion ratio, delay etc.