A congestion control technique for the near-sink nodes in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Without congestion control techniques specifically designed for sensor network applications, the system may not function properly due to data transmission failure. Moreover, most many-to-one communication schemes adopted by sensor network applications cause a practical congestion problem called the funneling effect. With this problem, the hottest area is confined to the connection between the sink and its neighbors. In order to solve the bottleneck problem, we propose a congestion-control technique which uses adaptive time-slot scheduling and a service-differentiated technique. The simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the conventional technique. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.