On the cross-layer interactions between congestion and contention in wireless sensor and actor networks

Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSAN) are composed of large number of sensor nodes collaboratively observing a physical phenomenon and relatively smaller number of actor nodes, which act upon the sensed phenomenon. Due to the limited capacity of shared wireless medium and memory restrictions of the sensor nodes, channel contention and network congestion can be experienced during the operation of the network. In fact, the multi-hop nature of WSAN entangles the level of local contention and the experienced network congestion. Therefore, the unique characteristics of WSAN necessitate a comprehensive analysis of the network congestion and contention under various network conditions. In this paper, we comprehensively investigate the interactions between contention resolution and congestion control mechanisms as well as the physical layer effects in WSAN. An extensive set of simulations are performed in order to quantify the impacts of several network parameters on the overall network performance. The results of our analysis reveal that the interdependency between network parameters call for adaptive cross-layer mechanisms for efficient data delivery in WSAN.