A Cache-Aware Congestion Control for Reliable Transport in Wireless Sensor Networks

Data caching and congestion control are two strategies that can enhance the transport reliability in constrained Wireless Sensor Networks. However, these two mechanisms are designed independently for most transport protocols developed for WSN. This work developed a new cache-aware congestion control mechanism for reliable transport. RT-CaCC utilizes cache management policies such as cache insertion, cache elimination and cache size to mitigate packet losses in the network while maximizing cache utilization and resource allocation. It uses two cache management policies for packet loss detection: implicit notifications and expiration of timeout. In addition, it utilizes congestion avoidance using cache-aware rate control mechanism employing transmission window limit as a function of cache size. Results showed that the RT-CaCC obtained significant improvement gain in terms of cache utilization, end-to-end delay and throughput performance specifically during high level of packet loss in the network.