Author(s): Mrs. Sonal Beniwal, Jyoti Kaushik
Recent advances in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) lead to applications with increased traffic demands. There are many cases in the fields of automation, health, and disaster response that demand WSNs with strict performance assurances. Congestion occurrence is a key factor that can negatively affect the performance of WSNs. The overwhelming majority of approaches that deal with congestion control in WSNs attempt to control congestion, by reducing the rate with which sources inject packets in the network. This method is called traffic control. Although traffic control seems to be an effective method for controlling congestion, it presents a number of drawbacks which are not easy to ignore. By controlling the rate with which packets are injected in the network, the amount of information that reaches the data sinks reduces. This fact can jeopardize the purpose of the network. Thus, in case of heavy data load, this path of nodes can easily become power exhausted. This leads to the creation of routing “holes” in the network. In this paper we approach congestion control and avoidance in WSNs with a different perspective.