RT-CaCC: A Reliable Transport With Cache-Aware Congestion Control Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

Reliability of data transport in wireless sensor networks is critical in the presence of high packet loss level either due to link contentions or buffer congestions. Mechanisms such as intermediate caching and congestion control can enhance the reliability performance of transport protocols in the event of packet loss. However, these two mechanisms are designed independently for most cache-based transport protocols. In this paper, we developed a new reliable transport protocol with a cache-aware congestion control mechanism called RT-CaCC. RT-CaCC utilizes cache management policies such as cache insertion, cache elimination, and cache size allocation to mitigate packet losses in the network while maximizing cache utilization and bandwidth allocation. The protocol was evaluated in network topologies with different packet loss scenarios. Results showed that RT-CaCC obtained an average of 15%–38% improvement gain compared with baseline protocols. In addition, RT-CaCC consistently outperformed other cache-based transport protocols like distributed TCP caching and end-to-end reliable and congestion aware transport layer protocol in terms of cache utilization, end-to-end delay, and fairness metrics. Finally, the comparison between simulation and analytical results showed that there is an almost perfect match with the difference between curve points never exceeding 14% of the analytical cost.