Congestion control and fairness for many-to-one routing in sensor networks

In this paper we propose a distributed and scalable algorithm that eliminates congestion within a sensor network, and that ensures the fair delivery of packets to a central node, or base station. We say that fairness is achieved when equal number of packets are received from each node. Since in general we have many sensors transmitting data to the base station, we consider the scenario where we have many-to-one multihop routing, noting that it can easily be extended to unicast or many-to-many routing. Such routing structures often result in the sensors closer to the base station experiencing congestion, which inevitably cause packets originating from sensors further away from the base station to have a higher probability of being dropped. Our algorithm exists in the transport layer of the traditional network stack model, and is designed to work with any MAC protocol in the data-link layer with minor modifications. Our solution is scalable, each sensor mote requires state proportional to the number of its neighbors. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution with both simulations and actual implementation in UC Berkeley's sensor motes.