Priority-Based Coverage-Aware Congestion Control for Multihop Wireless Sensor Networks

Congestion in a wireless sensor network (WSN) can lead to buffer overflow, resource waste and delay or loss of critical information from the sensors. In this paper, we propose the priority-based coverage-aware congestion control (PCC), which is a distributed, priority-distinct, and fair mechanism. PCC provides higher priority to packets with event information, which the sink is more interested in. PCC employs a queue scheduler which can selectively drop any packet in the queue. PCC gives fair chance to all sensors to transmit packets to the sink, irrespective of their specific locations, and therefore enhances the coverage fidelity of WSNs. Based on a detailed simulation analysis, we show that PCC can efficiently relieve congestion and significantly improve the system performance based on multiple metrics such as event throughput and coverage fidelity.