A Multievent Congestion Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are application-dependent networks. An application may require general event region information, per-node event region information, or prioritized event information in case of multiple events. All event flows are subject to congestion in wireless sensor networks. This is due to the sudden impulse of information flow from a number of event nodes to a single destination. Congestion degrades system throughput and results in energy loss of nodes. In this paper, we present a multievent congestion control protocol (MCCP) for wireless sensor networks. MCCP supports multiple event reporting modes, that is, general event reporting, per-node fair event reporting, and prioritized multiple event reporting. MCCP efficiently mitigates congestion and provides output according to selected event reporting mode. MCCP uses hop-by-hop packet delivery time and buffer size as the basic metrics for congestion detection. Moreover, we introduce a schedule-based scheme at the transport layer for rate assignment and ordered delivery of event packets to underlying routing layer. This helps to avoid packet collisions and increases the packet delivery ratio even in high densities. Detailed simulation analysis confirms that MCCP decreases packet drops and provides high packet delivery ratio (above 90%) for multiple event reporting modes.