A Survey on Congestion Control in Wireless Sensor Networks

In Recent years, wireless sensor network plays a vital role in various fields. A Wireless Sensor Network is deployed with large number of sensor nodes. These sensor nodes acquire real time information and transmit the information. When large number of sensor nodes are active in transmitting the information there is a possibility of congestion in the data packets. Congestion occurs due to buffer overflow, channel contention, Packet collision, Reporting rate, Many to One nature, dynamically time varying wireless channel condition. Congestion causes packet loss which in turn decreases network performance and throughput. It necessitates a congestion control algorithm for lossless data packet transmission. Many congestion control algorithms are available in literature. This paper reviews various existing techniques for detecting and controlling congestion. The techniques include Congestion Detection and Avoidance, Traffic Adaptive MAC, Event to Sink Reliable Transport, Congestion Control and Fairness. In addition, different performance metrics for measuring congestion was also surveyed. In this paper a comparison between the performances of the various congestion control techniques is also provided.