QoS routing in wireless sensor networks—a survey

Abstract

A wireless sensor network (WSN) is a one made up of small sensing devices equipped with processors, memory, and short-range wireless communication. Sensor nodes, are autonomous nodes, which include smart dust sensors, motes and so on. They co-operatively monitor physical or environmental conditions and send the sensed data to the sink node. They differ from traditional computer networks due to resource constraints, unbalanced mixture traffic, data redundancy, network dynamics, and energy balance. These kinds of networks support a wide range of applications that have strong requirements to reduce end-to-end delay and losses during data transmissions. When large numbers of sensors are deployed in a sensor field and are active in transmitting the data, there is a possibility of congestion. Congestion may occur due to buffer overflow, channel contention, packet collision, a high data rate, many to one nature, and so on. This leads to packet loss which causes a decrease in throughput and lifetime. Maximum throughput, energy efficiency and minimum error rate can be achieved by minimizing the congestion. A number of quality of service (QoS) techniques has been developed to improve the quality of the network. This article gives an overview of existing QoS techniques and a parametric comparison made with recent developments. This article mainly concentrates on network congestion in WSN environment.