A Survey on Congestion Control Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are composed of several sensor nodes which are limited in terms of resources for computing, storage, communication bandwidth, and, most importantly of all, energy. One of the major challenges in these networks is congestion, which is triggered by factors such as packet collision, node buffer overflow, transmission channel contention, transmission rate, and many-to-one data transmission from several nodes to the sink node. Congestion affects energy consumption and various parameters of service quality in sensor nodes. Therefore, it is one of the most critical issues in WSNs that requires developing more advanced techniques for its avoidance, diagnosis, and control. In this paper, different methods of congestion control have been investigated; also, a novel taxonomy has been proposed based on combination of concentration of congestion control policies, different algorithms employed, and the effective parameter in detecting and controlling congestion.