Non-Cooperative Game Theory Based Congestion Control in Lossy WSN

Congestion control is considered to be an important issue in wireless sensor networks as congestion can cause packet loss and degrade the throughput of the network. In this work, we have proposed a congestion control mechanism for a tree-based network by using non-cooperative game theory where each leaf node tries to maximize its data sending rate. The objective of the proposed work is to find a unique Nash equilibrium point to get the optimal data sending rate of each leaf node so that no congestion will occur at the destination parent node as long as the service rate of the destination node does not change. This also helps in maximizing the overall throughput of the network. In the proposed work, we consider both the buffer overflow and the channel congestion as the major causes of packet loss. The proposed congestion control method named Non-cooperative Game Theory based Congestion Control (NGTCC) has been simulated and compared with an existing algorithm for both single and multi-path tree networks. Simulation results show that the proposed method performs better than the existing method in terms of data sending rate and throughput.