Congestion Avoidance and Fair Event Detection in Wireless Sensor Network

Abstract

Summary Congestion in WSN increases the energy dissipation rates of sensor nodes as well as the loss of packets and thereby hinders fair and reliable event detection. 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 medium 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 and weighted round robin packet forwarding. We also propose in-node fair packet scheduling to achieve fair event detection. The results of simulation show our scheme exhibits more than 90% delivery ratio even under bursty traffic condition which is good enough for reliable event perception. Key words: Sensor Network, Congestion Avoidance, Hierarchical Medium Access, Fair Event Detection. 1. Introduction Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are densely deployed for a wide range of applications in the military, health, environment, agriculture and smart office domain. These networks deliver numerous types of traffic, from simple periodic reports to unpredictable bursts of packets triggered by sensed events. Therefore, congestion happens due to contention caused by concurrent transmissions, buffer overflows and time varying wireless channel condition [1][2][3]. As WSN is a multi-hop network, congestion taking place at a single node may diffuse to the whole network and degrades its performance drastically [4]. Congestion causes many folds of drawbacks: (i) it increases energy dissipation rates of sensor nodes, (ii) it causes a lot of packet loss, which in turn diminish the network throughput, and (iii) it hinders fair event detections and reliable data transmissions. Therefore, congestion avoidance and fair packet delivery become a crucial research issue for the practical realization of WSN based envisioned applications.