State-of-the-Art Congestion Control Protocols in WSN: A Survey

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) inherently are resource-constrained in terms of available energy, bandwidth, processing power and memory space. In these networks, congestion occurs when the incoming traffic load surpasses the available capacity of the network. There are various factors that lead to congestion in WSNs such as buffer overflow, varying rates of transmission, a many-to-one communication paradigm, channel contention and interference. Congestion leads to depletion of the nodes energy, deterioration of network performance and an increase in network latency and packet loss. As a result, energy-efficient and reliable state-of-the art congestion control protocols need to be designed to detect, notify and control congestion effectively. In this paper, we present a review of the latest state-of-the-art congestion control protocols. We analyze these protocols from various perspectives such as, their deployed environments, internal operational mechanisms, their advantages and disadvantages. Depending on their inherent nature of control mechanisms, these protocols are classified either as traffic-based congestion control or resource-based congestion control. Based on our analysis, we further subdivided these protocols based on their hop-by-hop and end-to-end delivery modes.