Delay-based end-to-end congestion control for wireless sensor networks

In wireless sensor networks, commonly used networking protocols may not necessarily function well due to the stringent requirements of such networks. A transport layer protocol for this environment must work well over shared wireless connections that are prone to packet errors. TCP´s burstiness due to its aggressiveness in probing for available capacity and multiplicative backoff in response to congestion yields a traffic profile that may not be suitable for wireless sensor networks. This work investigates how LEDBAT, a delay-based less-than-best-effort protocol, would behave in a wireless sensor network. Although LEDBAT was designed to yield to TCP when sharing a bottleneck link, simulations showed that under certain conditions, LEDBAT obtains a fair share of wireless bandwidth, ensuring node throughput in WSN scenarios. More importantly, it is also able to provide a steadier flow than TCP even as the number of hops to its destination increases.