Dynamic Contention Window based Congestion Control and Fair Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Network

Congestion in WSN increases energy dissipation rates of sensor nodes as well as loss of packets and thereby hinders fair and reliable event detections. We find that one of the key reasons of congestion in WSN is allowing sensing nodes to transfer as many packets as possible. This is due to the use of CSMA/CA that gives opportunistic media access control. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient congestion avoidance protocol that includes source count based hierarchical and load adaptive medium access control. Our proposed mechanism ensures load adaptive media access to the nodes and thus achieves fairness in event detection. The results of simulation show our scheme exhibits more than 90% delivery ratio with retry limit 1, even under bursty traffic condition which is good enough for reliable event perception.