Congestion alleviation method ZigBee-based wireless sensor network

Abstract

In the ZigBee wireless sensor network, the congestion will deteriorate the network performance and yield potential burst event. Especially, in a large-scale network, it is impossible to omit the situation. In this paper, we propose an effective congestion detection without consuming significant computational resource in the resource-constrained ZigBee wireless sensor network. Simultaneously, we propose a novel congestion alleviation with a flexible congestion level in Application Layer and Operating System Abstraction Layer of IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee protocol stack. Furthermore, in order to adjust the data flow of the network, we combine the congestion alleviation with a random driven fashion. Our test-bed is based on an open-source ZigBee protocols stack. Experimental results show that our algorithm outperforms the native ZigBee protocols in a spect of packet loss rate.