Mitigating Congestion and Improving the Performance of Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), congestion will cause packet loss which in turn wastes energy and reduces the lifetime of WSNs, Successful event detection in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) requires reliability and timeliness. When an event occurs, the base station (BS) is particularly interested about reliable and timely collection of data sent by the nodes close to the event, and the data sent by other nodes have little importance. Data generated in wireless sensor networks may not all be alike: some data may be more important than others and hence may have different delivery requirements. In this paper, we address differentiated data delivery in the presence of congestion in wireless sensor networks. We propose a class of algorithms that enforce differentiated routing based on the congested areas of a network and data priority. The basic protocol, called Congestion-Aware Routing (CAR), discovers the congested zone of the network that exists between high- priority data sources and the data sink and, using simple forwarding rules, dedicates this portion of the network to forwarding primarily high-priority traffic.