Mitigating congestion in wireless sensor networks through clustering and queue assistance: a survey

Abstract

A network of randomly deployed sensor nodes which shares limited resources like bandwidth, buffer, queue, and battery powered nodes is known as wireless sensor network. Such network must have energy, to avoid the chances of congestion because congested network degrades the performance of network. Congestion may occur due to several reasons like data packet collision, transmission channel contention and buffer overflow. A congestion control protocol must acquire the functionalities that can increase the lifetime and efficiency of network which are major responsibilities of wireless sensor network. In this paper traffic oriented, resource oriented and a hybrid approach with some additional functionalities of controlling congestion are discussed in a wide manner. The hybrid approach is best as per this survey as it integrates various factors of wireless sensor networks to control and mitigate the situation. A comprehensive analysis is also done on these factors to justify the nature of different approaches.