HRCT: Hop-By-Hop Rate Control Technique for Congestion Control in Wireless Sensor Network

In Wireless Sensor Networks, congestion occurs when the traffic rate is high. This happens when the an event is detected in a network. Congestion causes packet loss thus degrading the performance of the network. Hence it necessitates to develop an effective congestion control technique. This paper focuses on congestion due to concurrent transmission. We have proposed an efficient protocol to detect and control congestion in a MAC. The occurrence of congestion is detected by calculating a new metrics called congestion scale. When the congestion scale exceeds the threshold value it intimates, that, congestion has occurred. Congestion notification signal is send to all the nodes. On receiving the notification signal all nodes adjust their transmission rate to control congestion. We have implemented Hop-by-Hop Rate Control Technique(HRCT) to control congestion and to guarantee both high throughput and minimum delay. This technique is implemented successfully in NS-2 simulator. Finally, simulation results have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm.