CRAP: Cluster based Congestion Control with Rate Adjustment based on Priority in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Congestion in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) get worse when there are multiple and random flows of data in which some have superior significance over the others requiring fidelity in terms of packet delivery, QoS, energy efficiency and throughput. In node-level, congestion leads to impairment of packets that obviously reduces the QoS. In this paper, we present a Cluster based congestion control with Rate Adjustment based on Priority (CRAP) protocol, which self-organizes the sensor nodes into clusters. These clusters monitor congestion in a proactive manner within its confined range which exchanges information among them and adjusts the traffic rate when one cluster has high priority flow over the other. This rate adjustment is based on the exchange of traffic rate estimate among the clusters that reduces packet re-transmissions and energy loss. Our simulation expedites system wide rate control resulting in good throughput, very low packet loss probability and delay that deals with multiple, random flows of data.