Upstream congestion control in wireless sensor networks through cross-layer optimization

TLDR

Congestion in wireless sensor networks causes packet loss, excessive energy consumption, and degrades fairness and QoS for multimedia applications. The paper proposes a priority‑based congestion control protocol (PCCP) to manage upstream congestion in WSNs. PCCP measures congestion as the ratio of packet inter‑arrival to service time, assigns a node priority index, and applies cross‑layer hop‑by‑hop optimization to control congestion. Experiments show PCCP achieves efficient congestion control, weighted fairness, higher energy efficiency, and improved QoS with lower packet loss and delay.

Abstract

Congestion in wireless sensor networks not only causes packet loss, but also leads to excessive energy consumption. Therefore congestion in WSNs needs to be controlled in order to prolong system lifetime. In addition, this is also necessary to improve fairness and provide better quality of service (QoS), which is required by multimedia applications in wireless multimedia sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a novel upstream congestion control protocol for WSNs, called priority-based congestion control protocol (PCCP). Unlike existing work, PCCP innovatively measures congestion degree as the ratio of packet inter-arrival time along over packet service time. PCCP still introduced node priority index to reflect the importance of each sensor node. Based on the introduced congestion degree and node priority index, PCCP utilizes a cross-layer optimization and imposes a hop-by-hop approach to control congestion. We have demonstrated that PCCP achieves efficient congestion control and flexible weighted fairness for both single-path and multi-path routing, as a result this leads to higher energy efficiency and better QoS in terms of both packet loss rate and delay.