ERCTP: End-to-End Reliable and Congestion Aware Transport Layer Protocol for Heterogeneous WSN

Other than hardware optimization, the communication protocols for heterogeneous Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) are currently playing an important role for achieving the longevity of the network. Among other layers of heterogeneous WSN communication protocol stack, researchers are putting efforts in developing transport layer protocols in order to avoid congestion in WSN and provide data or application level reliability support thereby ensuring the QoS objectives of the heterogeneous WSN application. In this paper we have envisaged a light weight transport protocol design, End-to-End Reliable and Congestion Aware Transport Layer Protocol (ERCTP), which achieves high data reliability by the introduction of distributed memory concept within network and minimum packet drop due to congestion by the effective implementation of congestion detection and rate adjustment scheme that uses stochastic control framework. The proposed scheme is evaluated extensively against the TCP-Westwood+ (TCPWW+), TCP-Westwood (TCP-WW), TCPNewReno(TCP-NR), and TCPReno(TCP-R). The ERCTP has been tested for 24 mote topology and results reveal that the ERCTP effectively controls congestion and exhibits highest good throughput of 0.2941 Mbps, ≤ 100 msec average End-to-End (E-2-E) data packet latency for heterogeneous packet information, > 99% data packet reliability and overall energy efficient behavior (lowest per packet communication cost) in comparison to TCP-WW+, TCP-WW, TCP-NR and TCP-R.