Mohamed Amine Kafi

Congestion Control Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

The performance of wireless sensor networks (WSN) is affected by the lossy communication medium, application diversity, dense deployment, limited processing power and storage capacity, frequent topology change. All these limitations provide significant and unique design challenges to data transport control in wireless sensor networks. An effective transport protocol should consider reliable message delivery, energy-efficiency, quality of service and congestion control. The latter is vital for achieving a high throughput and a long network lifetime. Despite the huge number of protocols proposed in the literature, congestion control in WSN remains challenging. A review and taxonomy of the state-of-the-art protocols from the literature up to 2013 is provided in this paper. First, depending on the control policy, the protocols are divided into resource control vs. traffic control. Traffic control protocols are either reactive or preventive (avoiding). Reactive solutions are classified following the reaction scale, while preventive solutions are split up into buffer limitation vs. interference control. Resource control protocols are classified according to the type of resource to be tuned.

A Study of Wireless Sensor Networks for Urban Traffic Monitoring: Applications and Architectures

Abstract With the constant increasing of vehicular traffic around the world, especially in urban areas, existing traffic management solutions become inefficient. This can be clearly seen in our life through persistent traffic jam and rising number of accidents. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) based intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have emerged as a cost effective technology that bear a pivotal potential to overcome these difficulties. This technology enables a new broad range of smart city applications around urban sensing including traffic safety, traffic congestion control, road state monitoring, vehicular warning services, and parking management. This manuscript gives a comprehensive review on WSN based ITS solutions. The main contribution of this paper is to classify current WSNs based ITS projects from the application perspective, with discussions on the fulfillment of the application requirements.

A study of Wireless Sensor Network Architectures and Projects for Traffic Light Monitoring

Abstract Vehicular traffic is increasing around the world, especially in urban areas. This increase results in a huge traffic congestion, which has dramatic consequences on economy, human health, and environment. Traditional methods used for traffic management, surveillance and control become inefficient in terms of performance, cost, maintenance, and support, with the increased traffic. Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) is an emergent technology with an effective potential to overcome these difficulties, and will have a great added value to intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In this survey, we review traffic light projects and solutions. We discuss their architectural and engineering challenges, and shed some light on the future trends as well

Congestion Detection Strategies in Wireless sensor Networks: A Comparative Study with Testbed Experiments

Abstract Event based applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are prone to traffic congestion, where unpredicted event detection yields simultaneous generation of traffic at spatially co-related nodes, and its propagation towards the sink. This results in loss of information and waste energy. Early congestion detection is thus of high importance in such WSN applications to avoid the propagation of such a problem and to reduce its consequences. Different detection metrics are used in the congestion control literature. However, a comparative study that investigates the different metrics in real sensor motes environment is missing. This paper focuses on this issue and compares some detection metrics in a testbed network with MICAz motes. Results show the effectiveness of each method in different scenarios and concludes that the combination of buffer length and channel load constitute the better candidate for early and fictive detection.

A Survey on Reliability Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) applications have become more and more attractive with the miniaturization of circuits and the large variety of sensors. The different application domains, especially critical fields of WSN use, make the reliability of data acquisition and communication a hot research field that must be tackled efficiently. Indeed, the quality of largely used, cheap-cost wireless sensors and their scarce energy supply support these reliability challenges that lead to data loss or corruption. For solving this problem, the conception of a reliability mechanism that detects these shortcomings and recovers to them becomes necessary. In this article, we present a survey on existing reliability protocols conceived especially for WSNs due to their special features. The deep classification and discussion in this study allow for understanding the pros and cons of state-of-the-art works in order to enhance the existing schemes and fill the gaps. We have classified the works according to the required level of reliability, the manner to identify the origins of the lack of reliability, and the control to recover this lack of reliability. Across the discussion along this study, we deduce that the cross-layer design between MAC, routing, and transport layers presents a good concept to efficiently overcome the different reliability holes.

REFIACC: Reliable, efficient, fair and interference-aware congestion control protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract The recent wireless sensor network applications are resource greedy in terms of throughput and network reliability. However, the wireless shared medium leads to links interferences in addition to wireless losses due to the harsh environment. The effect of these two points translates on differences in links bandwidth capacities, lack of reliability and throughput degradation. In this study, we tackle the problem of throughput maximization by proposing an efficient congestion control-based schedule algorithm, dubbed REFIACC (Reliable, Efficient, Fair and Interference-Aware Congestion Control) protocol. REFIACC prevents the interferences and ensures a high fairness of bandwidth utilization among sensor nodes by scheduling the communications. The congestion and the interference in inter and intra paths hot spots are mitigated through tacking into account the dissimilarity between links’ capacities at the scheduling process. Linear programming is used to reach optimum utilization efficiency of the maximum available bandwidth. REFIACC has been evaluated by simulation and compared with two pertinent works. The results show that the proposed solution outperforms the others in terms of throughput and reception ratio (more than 80%) and can scale for large networks.

Interference-aware Congestion Control Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks☆

This paper deals with congestion and interference control in wireless sensor networks (WSN), which is essential for improving the throughput and saving the scarce energy in networks where nodes have different capacities and traffic patterns. A scheme called IACC (Interference-Aware Congestion Control) is proposed. It allows maximizing link capacity utilization for each node by controlling congestion and interference. This is achieved through fair maximum rate control of interfering nodes in inter and intra paths of hot spots. The proposed protocol has been evaluated by simulation, where the results rival the effectiveness of our scheme in terms of energy saving and throughput. In particular, the results demonstrate the protocol scalability and considerable reduction of packet loss that allow to achieve as high packet delivery ratio as 80% for large networks.

DZ50: Energy-efficient Wireless Sensor Mote Platform for Low Data Rate Applications☆

Abstract A low cost and energy e_cient wireless sensor mote platform for low data rate monitoring applications is presented. The new platform, named DZ50, is based on the ATmega328P micro-controller and the RFM12b transceiver, which consume very low energy in low-power mode. Considerable energy saving can be achieved by reducing the power consumption during inactive (sleep) mode, notably in low data rate applications featured by long inactive periods. Without loss of generality, spot monitoring in a Smart Parking System (SPS) and soil moisture in a Precision Irrigation System (PIS) are selected as typical representative of low data rate applications. The performance of the new platform is investigated for typical scenarios of the selected applications and compared with that of MicaZ and TelosB. Energy measurements have been carried out for di_erent network operation states and settings, where the results reveal that the proposed platform allows to multiply the battery lifetime up to 7 times compared to MicaZ and TelosB motes in 10s sampling period scenarios.

Performance analysis and evaluation of REFIACC using queuing networks

Abstract Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) utilisation is characterised by its dense deployment in order to fulfil the monitoring tasks. This density of communication leads to interference and congestion. In a previous work, a schedule scheme dubbed REFIACC (Reliable, Efficient, Fair and Interference Aware Congestion Control), that takes into account interferences and different links capacities in order to avoid packet loss due congestion, was proposed. REFIACC idea was validated using comparative simulations. In this study, REFIACC scheduling scheme was modelled using Markov chains. The modelling concerns queue length evolution and global system throughput. Different hypothesis details for queue length monitoring, according to application motivation, have led to many variants of models. The evaluation of the model using MATLAB has shown its effectiveness concerning packet reception ratio and reception overhead.

REFIACC Scheme Evaluation Using Analytical Modeling

The wireless shared medium used by Wireless Sensor Networks applications causes a problem related to interference, specially with dense deployment that characterizes the WSNs. This requires the use of congestion control scheme to avoid interferences and buffer overflow that degrade the application reliability. REFIACC (Reliable, Efficient, fair and Interference aware Congestion control) schedule scheme is a cross layer congestion control protocol that avoids the aforementioned problems while maximizing throughput and fairness. In our previously studies, we have validated REFIACC using extensive simulations. In this study, REFIACC is modeled using Stochastic Automata Networks (SAN). In fact, SAN presents a good tool to avoid state-space explosion of Markov chains.