An efficient traffic contention and control mechanism to improve QoS in heterogeneous wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (HWSN) gathers information from a cooperative network. In HWSN, the sensor nodes are scattered and the major challenges are topology control, battery optimization, packet loss and link lifetime. The existing techniques do not concentrate on all the mentioned issues. The objective of this work is to provide congestion-free data transfer with higher throughput and increased packet delivery ratio. In the proposed methodology, three protocols are designed and developed, namely, hop by hop rate adjustment protocol (HHRA), energy efficient data transfer protocol (EEDT) and alternative routing congestion control protocol (ARCC). The HHRA protocol senses the traffic in the channel and adjusts the transmission rate accordingly to avoid congestion. Secondly, the EEDT protocol is used to find specific nodes that are more efficient and transfer packets through those nodes to improve throughput. The ARCC protocol is used to redirect the path of transmission during the occurrence of congestion. Thus, the proposed traffic contention and control mechanisms ensures congestion free transmission and increases the packet delivery ratio by 23% and average throughput by 20% compared to the dynamic contention window based congestion control (DCWCC) algorithm.