RMRP: A reliable MAC and routing protocol for congestion in IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless sensor networks

In general, the sensor network has a many-to-one communication architecture wherein each node transmits its data to a sink. This leads the congested nodes to die early and nodes nears the sink suffer from significant traffic concentrations. In this paper, we propose a crosslayer based routing and MAC protocol which is compatible with the IEEE 802.15.4 standard without additional overhead. The key mechanism is to provide dynamic route discovery and route maintenance operations to avoid and mitigate the most congested nodes by monitoring link status such as link delay, buffer occupancy and residential energy. In addition, the proposed protocol also provides a dynamic tuning of BE (Binary Exponent) and frame retransmission opportunities according to the hop distance to the sink node to mitigate funnel effects. We conducted simulations, verifying the performance over existing protocols.