Utilizing Mobile Nodes for Congestion Control in Wireless Sensor Networks (poster)

Abstract

Congestion control and avoidance in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is a subject that has attracted a lot of research attention in the last decade. Besides traffic and resource control, the utilization of mobile nodes has also been suggested as a way to control congestion. Such efforts mainly concentrated on utilizing mobile sinks for data collection and congestion avoidance, rather than mobile nodes for congestion mitigation. In this work, we present a Mobile Congestion Control (MobileCC) algorithm with two variations, to assist existing congestion control algorithms in facing congestion in WSNs. The first variation employs mobile nodes that create locally-significant alternative paths leading to the sink. The second variation employs mobile nodes that create completely individual (disjoint) paths to the sink. Simulation results show that both variations can significantly contribute to the alleviation of congestion in WSNs. The same technique can be used to recover from other types of network faults as well.