A Priority-Based Congestion Control Algorithm for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is an area that has generated an increasing interest currently worldwide. WSNs fall under IEEE 802.11 standard in which wireless network is formed by sensor nodes (SNs) that interconnect with each other through wireless links. SNs are capable of sensing, processing, and communicating via a wireless channel in a harsh environment, and most of them are battery powered. WSNs are mostly used for traffic communication in different environments such as irrigations, healthcare, home, and the military. WSNs are implemented to monitor temperature, humidity, pressure, among others within the network environment. The implementation of WSNs in various environment came with different challenges such as traffic congestion. The traffic congestion that occurs during packet transmission is normally occurs when there is buffer overflow. As a result, packet loss, packet delay, and network throughput impairment occurred during packet transmission within the network. This paper proposed a Priority-Based Congestion Control (PBCC) algorithm in order to manage packet distribution to avoid the buffer overflow in WSNs while improving Quality of Service (QoS). The Particle Swarm Optimization Gravitational Search Algorithm (PSOGSA) and Weighted Priority based Fair Queue Gradient Rate Control (WPFQGRC) were integrated in order to develop the proposed PBCC algorithm. Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) was used to test the effectiveness of the proposed PBCC algorithm. The simulation results showed that the proposed PBCC algorithm reduced the packet loss by 29.4%, packet delay by 32.6%, and improved network throughput by 96.8% when compared with PSOGSA and WPFQGRC algorithms.