A survey on congestion control techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks are event based systems that consists of a collection of autonomous sensor nodes that are spatially distributed and cooperatively monitor physical and environmental conditions. When an event has been detected these sensor nodes become active in transmitting the information and the load becomes heavy, increasing the data traffic and this might lead to congestion that results in packet drops, throughput reduction and degradation of channel quality which in turn decrease network performance. A congestion control scheme is necessary to monitor and regulate the traffic levels at an acceptable value. This paper review various existing works used for detecting and controlling congestion. Different performance metrics that are used for measuring congestion was also surveyed. Finally a comparison of various performance measures was presented.