A Simple Priority-based Scheme for Delay-sensitive Data Transmission over Wireless Sensor Networks

In the course of last decade, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have grabbed attention of both academic research community and industrial users. Such networks provide a broad range of applications, making them of great significance. Energy is the greatest concern of such battery-operated networks as it directly influences the lifetime of the network. As packet dropping due to congestion has a dramatically negative impact on energy consumption, congestion control is a vital issue for wireless sensor network, particularly for wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) in which bursty traffic is prevailing. In this paper, we present a simple yet efficient priority-aware congestion control scheme to support bursty data. Results achieved from our extensive simulation experiments corroborate that the proposed scheme operates well in terms of delay, throughput, and packet dropping, for both bursty and ordinary traffic.