Hop-count based energy efficient traffic control mechanism in wireless sensor network

Abstract

In Wireless sensor network, sensor nodes have battery-constrained devices and most of the energy is spent on communication with other nodes. For its traffic feature as burst traffic type toward sink node, it has high probability to network congestion. Network congestion causes packet drop and retransmission of dropped packets draws energy consumption. In particular, the loss of packets that is from sensor node far away from sink node requires additional energy consumption. In this paper, we propose a hop-count based traffic control mechanism that determines packet transfer by considering priority of packet and congestion level as well as hop count. Analysis of proposed mechanism by simulation demonstrated that it improved energy efficiency. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.