Rate aware congestion control mechanism for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). inherit low processing, shorter range and low power features with the miniature size to offer wireless transmission. Therefore, in order to fulfil the long-time data sensing need, several Quality of Service (QoS) parameters such as: lesser delay, higher throughput and packet delivery ratio (PDR) with minimum overhead must to be improved. In recent years extensive research efforts have been made to ameliorate these parameters to achieve optimum QoS. However, the rate adaptation and congestion control in WSNs are still least explored areas. The traffic congestion in WSNs is the main reason that results in higher delay and low throughput. In this paper, a new rate aware congestion control (RACC) mechanism has been proposed which defines three levels of congestion based on which the data rate, throughput, overhead and the delay. RACC at the transport layer, improves congestion by source rate regulation at the specific hotspot areas. Further, RACC has been applied to different modulation schemes like: 16 QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation), BPSK (Binary Phase Shift Keying) and QPSK (Quadrature Phase Shift Keying) to test the optimum modulation scheme for the proposed approach. The testing is done to ensure the that the data can be sent to the longer distant sensors using appropriate modulation technique suitable for the congestion model (RACC). The simulation outcomes in NS2 tool confirms the improvement of RACC over existing techniques (Delay-aware congestion control protocol (DACC) and Joint energy replenishment and load balancing (J-ERLB)) in WSNs. The overall improvement for RACC over existing techniques follows an improvement percentage 17% for throughput parameter, for packet delivery ratio, it is 8.35%, while for normalized routing overhead it shows 0.56% and for MAC Overhead, average end to end delay, and average remaining energy it shows 0.64%, 2.04% and 59.28% improvement respectively.