Congestion control in Internet of Things: Classification, challenges, and future directions

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is a collection of billions of smart objects connected via different types of communication media. Although IoT devices generate enormous data, they are still constrained by low processing, power, and limited buffer size. Constraints within smart devices are a prime cause of congestion among IoT networks, causing performance degradation and data loss. Hence, this survey focuses on congestion and related issues as the primary source causing significant performance issues in IoT networks. IoT communication is categorized into reliable and unreliable, identical to the Internet-based systems. This survey presents a detailed study of various congestion control schemes for reliable and unreliable communication, as well as evaluate “divergence” among IoT devices. Congestion control within and among IoT networks is either (i) end-to-end, or (ii) hop-by-hop. We summarize and compare the techniques prevalent among existing IoT networks. We further present a detailed study of communication technologies for IoT devices. Moreover, we focus on the various granularities of congestion for the IoT network stack. We also present essential artifacts in the congestion taxonomy, depicting critical aspects of IoT congestion control. Moreover, we give a detailed study of various congestion control algorithms based on rate adaption and traffic engineering schemes.