Congestion Control Approaches Applied to Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are a specific category of wireless ad-hoc networks where their performance is highly affected by application, life time, storage capacity, processing power, topology changes, the communication medium and bandwidth. These limitations necessitate an effective data transport control in WSNs considering quality of service, energy efficiency, and congestion control. Congestion is a critical issue in wireless networks. Congestion in WSNs badly effects loss rate, channel quality, link utilization, number of retransmissions, traffic flow, network life time, delay, energy and throughput. Due to the dominant role of WSNs in recent technologies, it is necessary to design more efficient congestion control algorithms. In this paper a comprehensive review of different congestion control schemes in WSNs is provided. In particular, different congestion control schemes are classified based on the way congestion is detected, notified and mitigated. Furthermore, congestion mitigation algorithms are classified. Also, different performance metrics are used to compare congestion control algorithms. Finally, the current work attempts to provide specific directives to design and develop novel congestion control schemes.