ECODA: Enhanced congestion detection and avoidance for multiple class of traffic in sensor networks

Congestion in a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) can cause missing packets, low energy efficiency, and long delay. Moreover, some applications, e.g. multimedia and image, need to transmit large volumes of data concurrently from several sensors. These applications have different delay and QoS requirements. Congestion problem is more urgent in such applications. To address this challenge, we propose an energy efficient congestion control scheme for sensor networks, called ECODA (Enhanced congestion detection and avoidance) which comprises three mechanisms: (1) use buffer and weighted buffer difference for congestion detection; (2) propose a bottleneck-node-based source data sending rate control scheme; (3) use Flexible Queue Scheduler for packets transfer. Simulations show that ECODA achieves efficient congestion control and flexible weighted fairness for different class of traffic. Therefore it leads to higher energy efficiency and better QoS in terms of throughput, fairness, and delay.