Distributed Congestion Mitigation and Medium Access in Duty Cycling Wireless Sensor Networks

• Main Authors: Hao Liu, Ye Liu
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publishing 2014-08-01
• Series: International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1155/2014/748264

Duty cycling is an efficient design approach to achieve energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks. However, it may aggravate congestion due to long access delay and amplified hidden/exposed terminal problems. This paper first investigates some key facts that impact congestion and deteriorate packet transmission. With above observations, we propose a queue length based contention window adjustment approach, which allows congested nodes having high priority to access the channel. Then, a batch transmission scheme is introduced to drain accumulated packets rapidly. Finally, a random preamble mechanism is designed, so that congested nodes have more chances to get channel when other transmission is happening. Through the experiments on TelosB nodes test-bed using TinyOS, evaluation results show that our proposed schemes can mitigate congestion efficiently and have better performance than traditional approaches.