Adaptive queue management and traffic class priority based fairness rate control in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Congestion control in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is one of the key areas of research and different algorithms have been proposed using either of the notions of fair rate allocation, traffic class priority, and queue management. Use of the any one of the above is not adequate to address the challenges. Hence, in this paper, we have proposed a novel congestion control algorithm using the combined notions of fair allocation of bandwidth, prioritizing traffic classes, and Adaptive Queue Management (ADQM). The proposed Weighted Priority based Fair Queue Gradient Rate Control (WPFQGRC) scheme achieves the fair distribution of spare bandwidth by considering the traffic class priority, average queue size, and the connected loads of a node. Average queue size at every node is adapted based on the proposed notion of the gradient of the differential of Global Priority (GP) with respect to the differential of queue size. The output rate of a given node is computed based on the GP of the node and the average queue size. The spare bandwidth of a node is fairly distributed by taking into account the connected load of the given node. The proposed algorithm is developed to suit to a general topology of WSN, however for the sake of illustration, we have considered a tree topology network that deals with both Real-Time (RT) and Non-Real Time (NRT) traffic classes. The proposed algorithm is implemented in NS3 platform in Linux environment and the performance of the algorithm is evaluated in terms of throughput, packet loss, packet delay, traffic class patterns, node mobility, and the average queue size. The performance of the proposed algorithm is found to be superior to that of Yaghmaee et al.'s, Brahma et al.'s, Monowar et al.'s, Sarode et al.'s, Difference of Differentials Rate Control (DDRC), Weighted Priority based DDRC (WPDDRC), and Priority based Fairness Rate Control (PFRC) algorithms respectively.