Interference-aware Congestion Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper deals with congestion and interference control in wireless sensor networks (WSN), which is essential for improving the throughput and saving the scarce energy in networks where nodes have different capacities and traffic patterns. A scheme called IACC (Interference-Aware Congestion Control) is proposed. It allows maximizing link capacity utilization for each node by controlling congestion and interference. This is achieved through fair maximum rate control of interfering nodes in inter and intra paths of hot spots. The proposed protocol has been evaluated by simulation, where the results rival the effectiveness of our scheme in terms of energy saving and throughput. In particular, the results demonstrate the protocol scalability and considerable reduction of packet loss that allow to achieve as high packet delivery ratio as 80% for large networks.