Buffer and Rate Control Based Congestion Avoidance in Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to dense deployment and innumerable amount of traffic flow in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), congestion becomes more common phenomenon from simple periodic traffic to unpredictable bursts of messages triggered by external events. Even for simple network topology and periodic traffic, congestion is a likely event due to dynamically time varying wireless channel condition and contention caused due to interference by concurrent transmissions. In this paper, we have proposed three mechanisms: upstream source count and buffer based rate control and snoop based MAC level ACK scheme to avoid congestion. The simulation results show that our proposed mechanism achieves around 80% delivery ratio even under bursty traffic condition