Improving reliable data transport in wireless sensor networks through dynamic cache-aware rate control mechanism

Data delivery in low power and lossy networks like Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), which has a significant role in Internet of Things (IoT), is vital due to the high probability of packet loss due to wireless and constrained environment. Data caching and transmission rate control are independent ways of improving the performance of transport protocols in WSN by immediately responding to packet losses in the network. However, a suitable rate control for cache-based transport protocols is not yet investigated. This work developed a dynamic cache-aware rate control algorithm that uses a transmission window rate as a function of cache size allocation used by intermediate nodes and utilizes cache elimination policy to notify packet losses in the network. A baseline cache-based transport protocol called DTSN+ is used to implement the rate control algorithm and evaluated under different network scenarios. Results show that the cache-aware approach improves the performance of the baseline transport protocol during high level of packet losses in the network in terms of cache utilization especially at lower cache size value. The algorithm also obtained outstanding throughput, transmission time and fairness performance as compared with original DTSN+ and DTC protocols. In the future, these results can serve as an underlying support in designing a new cache-aware congestion control framework that can be integrated in a transport protocol to mitigate packet losses in WSN.