Selective packet discarding for congestion control in wireless sensor network

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) provides a monitoring system for natural phenomena such as volcanoes eruption and earthquake detection which can effecting the life of human being in a certain area. The Quality of Service (QoS) of the application must be high in order to increase the effectiveness of the application. However, the congestion in WSN reduce the QoS of the application. Besides, there are several limitations in WSN that further affect the QoS of WSN applications. Such as limited resources which limits its performance. Resources such as power, memory and bandwidth really limit the life time of a sensor node. Hence, to ensure the continuity of the sensor node, the limited resources are needed to be used wisely. The power consumption of a sensor node can be reduced by reducing the rate of packet retransmission which is caused by congestion. By reducing the congestion rate, the memory usage can be reduced too. In this thesis, a selective packet discarding method which is known as Packet Discarding based Node Clustering (PDNC) is introduced. All nodes deployed in the targeted area will be clustered into several clusters and a cluster head will be selected at a time. The packet discarding process will then be carried at each node. The number of packet drop, throughput, end-to-end delay and energy consumption is recorded and analyzed. From the result, it can be seen that as the PDNC method is applied, the rate of congestion is reduced. An example scenario is developed in Network Simulator 2 simulation with the Mannasim framework.