Design and Analysis of a Backpressure Congestion Control Algorithm in Wireless Sensor Network

More attention has been paid to congestion control in the emerging area of wireless sensor network (WSN). However, most research works in the past stayed at the level of the current algorithms design or modification, and seldom sought solutions on the viewpoint of architecture. In this paper, Backpressure(BP) under Active Network(AN) architecture is used to make congestion control more responsive to detect/recover congestion in WSN. We design a simple Active Backpressure mechanism to allocate bandwidth Proportional to the Size of tree (ABPS), and we present a fluid-based analytical model of ABPS using stochastic differential equations. ABPS introduces programs in each data packet that tell nodes how to react to congestion, and quickly converge to a fair and efficient rate. We demonstrate a deterministic approach to analyse the stochastic model, in which we obtain a set of ordinary differential equations from our model, and we derive the average behavior of queue length and flow throughput from the ordinary differential equations. Finally, we evaluate ABPS extensively on a 50-node wireless sensor network. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of our ABPS and match well with the theoretic analysis.