Congestion-Aware Routing Algorithm Based on Traffic Priority in Wireless Sensor Networks

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a network that uses sensors to monitor environmental or physical conditions on different distributed devices. In many applications of wireless sensor network, due to the high volume of traffic, probability of congestion and packet loss increases. Congestion in sensor networks has a direct effect on energy efficiency and quality of service applications. Congestion may cause a buffer overflow, longer queuing time and higher packet loss. Packet loss not only reduces the reliability and quality of service application but also wastes energy. In this paper, a scheme for controlling congestion in wireless sensor network is proposed. The aim of the proposed method is to reduce congestion by considering the priority of data. In the proposed algorithm, according to the data priority, the packets will be classified. According to type of packet, traffic is redirected to control congestion in the network. Finally, the proposed algorithm is simulated and the result shows that the proposed algorithm improves the number of packet loss, energy consumption and average buffer size rather than the similar algorithm.