Priority Based Congestion Detection and Avoidance in Wireless Sensor Networks

The primary objective of event driven wireless sensor networks is to route the detected or monitored data at the earliest to the base station depending on their degree of priority since the data generated in a sensor network has different importance. In order to avoid indiscriminate dropping of data during congestion we propose a novel congestion protocol named priority based congestion detection and avoidance in wireless sensor networks. It aims to provide differentiated data delivery during congestion which comprises of packet priority assignment based on data value, dual queue scheduler for scheduling the next packet to forward based on priority and finally a dynamic dual path congestion aware routing protocol is developed. Our simulation results and analysis shows that this new protocol provides better performance than existing protocols in terms of throughput, packet delivery ratio and packet loss.