Mobile-CC: Introducing mobility to WSNs for congestion mitigation in heavily congested areas

Abstract

As applications in Wireless Sensor Networks are evolving, performance bounds are becoming stricter. Novel applications introduce much heavier traffic load, which, in turn, leads specific areas in the network to face congestion problems. In this paper, we describe the notion of using mobile nodes to mitigate congestion under specific circumstances. We examine the benefits of introducing new mobile nodes placed between the congested areas and sinks, in order to provide alternative disjoint paths towards them. The proposed Mobile Congestion Control (Mobile-CC) algorithm is applicable in areas where congestion happens repeatedly, or is of high duration, or even permanent. If congestion happens for very small period of time there will be no big benefit (in terms of congestion mitigation) when moving any nodes to that area, unless there is great probability of the event happening again at the same place in the future. Mobile-CC is not replacing existing congestion control or routing algorithms but instead aims to mitigate congestion, running in parallel with them.