Congestion Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks Handling Prioritized Heterogeneous Traffic

Abstract

Heterogeneous applications could be assimilated within the same wireless sensor network with the aid of modern motes that have multiple sensor boards on a single radio board. Different types of data generated from such types of motes might have different transmission characteristics in terms of priority, transmission rate, required bandwidth, tolerable packet loss, delay demands etc. Considering a sensor network consisting of such multi-purpose nodes, in this paper we propose Prioritized Heterogeneous Traffic-oriented Congestion Control Protocol (PHTCCP) which ensures efficient rate control for prioritized heterogeneous traffic. Our protocol uses intra-queue and inter-queue priorities for ensuring feasible transmission rates of heterogeneous data. It also guarantees efficient link utilization by using dynamic transmission rate adjustment. Detailed analysis and simulation results are presented along with the description of our protocol to demonstrate its effectiveness in handling prioritized heterogeneous traffic in wireless sensor networks.