As Wireless Sensor Networks are evolving in a wide range where high load demands dominate and affects the overall performance of the network, congestion remains a serious problem that has to be tackled effectively. Since the capacity of shared wireless medium is limited, channel contention and network congestion can be experienced during the operation of the network. In this paper, a new cross-layer protocol stack for congestion control is proposed that attempts to control network congestion during collisions. The proposed protocol stack aims to avoid buffer overflow at each node during high traffic density and thus reduce packet losses during transmission in order to achieve efficient communication in WSN. The simulation results show that the proposed cross-layer protocol efficiently mitigates packet losses and improves overall network throughput.

1. K. Romer and F. Mattern, "The design space of wireless sensor networks," IEEE Wireless Communications, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 54–61, December 2004.
2. S. Toumpis and L. Tassiulas, "Optimal deployment of large wireless sensor networks," IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 52, no. 7, pp. 2935–2953, 2006.
3. M. C. Vuran, V. C. Gungor, and O. B. Akan, "On the Interdependency of congestion and Contention in Wireless Sensor Networks," presented at ICST SenMetrics '05, San Diego, CA, 2005.
4. B. Hull, K. Jamieson, and H. Balakrishnan, "Mitigating Congestion in Wireless Sensor Networks," in ACM SenSys 2004. Baltimore, MD, 2004.
5. I. Demirkol, C. Ersoy, and F. Alagoz, "MAC Protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey," in IEEE Communications Magazine, 2005.
6. C. Song, S. Hamid, and N. Guevara, "Improving performance of MAC layer by using congestion control/avoidance methods in wireless network," in Proceedings of the 2001 ACM symposiumon Applied computing. Las Vegas, Nevada, United States: ACM Press, 2001.
7. E. J. Anderson and T. E. Anderson, "On the stability of adaptive routing in the presence of congestion control," in IEEE INFOCOM. San Fransisco, CA, 2003.
8. I. Glauche, W. Krause, R. Sollacher, and M. Greiner, "Distributive routing and congestion control in wireless multihop ad hoc communication networks," Physica A, pp. 677 - 701, 2004.
9. S. Shakkottai, T. S. Rappaport and P. C. Karlsson, Cross layer design for wireless networks, IEEE Communications Magazine, April 2003.
10. L. van Hoesel, T. Nieberg, J. Wu, and P. J. M. Havinga, "Prolonging the lifetime of wireless sensor networks by cross-layer interaction," IEEE Wireless Communications, vol. 11, no. 6, pp. 78 - 86, Dec. 2004.
11. T. Melodia, M. C. Vuran, D. Pompili, "The State of the Art in Crosslayer Design for Wireless Sensor Networks," to appear in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), 2006.
12. Y. Yi and S. Shakkottai, "Hop-by-hop Congestion Control over a Wireless Multi-hop Network," IEEE/ACM Transaction on Networking, 2006.
13. C. -T. Ee and R. Bajcsy, "Congestion control and fairness for many-to-one routing in sensor networks," in Proc. ACM Sensys, Nov. 2004.
14. C. -Y. Wan, S. B. Eisenman, A. T. Campbell, and J. Crowcroft, "Siphon: Overload traffic management using multi-radio virtual sinks in sensor networks," in Proc. ACM SenSys, Nov. 2005.
15. W. -w. Fang, J. -m. Chen, L. Shu, T. -s. Chu, and D. -p. Qian, "Congestion avoidance, detection and alleviation in wireless sensor networks," Journal of Zhejiang University - Science C, vol. 11, pp. 63–73, 2010, 10. 1631/jzus. C0910204.
16. A. Woo and D. C. Culler, "A transmission control scheme for media access in sensor networks," in Proc. ACM Mobicom, July 2004.
17. C. Wang, B. Li and K. Sohraby, "Upstream Congestion Control in Wireless Sensor Networks through Cross-layer Optimization," IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vo. 25, no. 4, pp. 786-795, 2007.
18. Liqiang Tao and Fengqi Yu, "ECODA: Enhanced Congestion Detection and Avoidance for Multiple Class of Traffic in Sensor Networks", Proceedings of the 15th Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications (APCC 2009), pp. 726-730, 2009
19. Yu-Pin Hsu and Kai-Ten Feng, "Cross-Layer Routing for Congestion Control in Wireless Sensor Networks," Radio and Wireless Symposium, p. 783-786, 2008.
20. J. Wan, X. Xu, R. Feng and Y. Wu, "Cross-Layer Active Predictive Congestion Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks," Sensors 2009, vol. 9, no. 10, pp. 8278- 8310, 2009.
21. A. Warrier, S. Janakiraman, S. Ha and I. Rhee, "DiffQ: Practical Differential Backlog Congestion Control for Wireless Networks," INFOCOM, pp. 19-25, 2009.
22. Joa-Hyoung Lee and In-Bum Jung, "Adaptive-Compression Based Congestion Control Technique for Wireless Sensor Networks,"Sensors 2010, vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 2919-2945, 2010.
23. Wei-wei Fang, Ji-ming Chen, Lei Shu, Tian-shu Chu and De-peiQian, "Congestion avoidance, detection and alleviation in wireless sensor networks," J. Zhejiang Univ, vol. 11, no. 1, pp. 63-73, 2010.
24. N. Sengottaiyan and R. Somasundaram, "A Modified Routing Algorithm for Reducing Congestion in Wireless Sensor Networks," Eur. J. Sci. Res, vol. 35, no. 4, pp. 529- 536, 2009.
25. P. Reena and L. Jacob, "A Cross Layer Design for Congestion Control in UWB Based Wireless Sensor Networks," Int. J. Sens. Netw, vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 223-235, 2009.
26. Jian-JunLeiand Gu-In Kwon, "Reliable Data Transmission Based on Erasure-resilient Code in Wireless Sensor Networks", KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 62-77, 2010.

Congestion Control Buffer Overflow Collisions Back-off Time Wireless Sensor Networks