A Novel Cross-layer Congestion Control Strategy for Wireless Sensor Networks

Network congestion in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) leads to packet drops, throughput reduction and degradation of channel quality which in turn decrease network performance. A novel cross-layer congestion control strategy for WSNs is presented. The strategy performs the bandwidth and delay estimation in MAC layer for the current link, and feedbacks them to the transport layer through the cross-layer interaction mechanism. The transport layer of source nodes adjusts the congestion window and slow start threshold based on the received information of path bandwidth and delay and Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN), for mitigating network congestion. The simulation results show that the strategy can improve the utilization of network resources, reduce unnecessary packets retransmission, and significantly improve the performance of WSNs.