Priority Based Adaptive Rate Control in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Difference of Differential Approach

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), when deployed in a real world scenario have to deal with a wide variety of data. Because of the constrained bandwidth, different types of data need to be handled with different priorities in order to prevent congestion in a network. Traffic class priority based rate control algorithms have been proposed by Yaghmaee et al. for congestion avoidance and these are based on the rate difference at a given node. In this research work, we have proposed a Difference of Differential Rate Control (DDRC) algorithm at a given node, which is based on the difference of differential rate between sink node and the given node. The next proposed one is Weighted Priority Difference of Differential Rate Control (WPDDRC) algorithm which is based on the combination of the weighted priority of the traffic class and the difference of differential rate of a given node. This is intended to handle Real Time (RT) data, which may be bursty in nature, and also a combination of the RT and Non-Real Time (NRT) data. Though the proposed algorithms are validated on a fixed topology, they are also valid for the general topology of WSN. The proposed algorithms have been implemented in NS3 platform and the performances of the algorithms have been found to be superior to those of counterpart techniques.