Handling fairness in wireless sensor network

Wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of spatially distributed sensors to monitor environmental conditions. WSN has ability to cope up with the node failure, power consumption, data transfer. Performance characteristics of transport layer are reliability, congestion control, fairness, throughput etc. Performance of transport layer protocol is evaluated by these characteristics. Sensor nodes closer to the sink carries large number of packets. To avoid the congestion and reduce the probability of packet loss we have to reduce the number of packets processed by near sink nodes. So handling fairness in wireless sensor network is very essential. Fairness maintains the network traffic and helps to avoid congestion. To achieve fairness it is necessary to adjust packet transmission rate. In this paper we discuss different techniques used to achieve the fairness. And finally we discuss factors affecting fairness and requirement of traffic to be fair.