Noncooperative Gaming for Energy-Efficient Congestion Control in 6LoWPAN

摘要

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) provide a significant contribution to the advancement of the Internet of Things (IoT) as it can transfer massive volume of data to the Internet with the help of low-power and low-cost self-operating sensing devices. This article deals with the congestion problem which is one of the critical issues in IPV6 over low-power and lossy wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN)-based network as it causes significant packet loss that leads to degraded throughput and extra energy consumption. We propose a congestion control mechanism for 6LoWPAN by using the noncooperative game theory. The proposed method named noncooperative gaming for energy-efficient congestion control (NGECC) determines the optimal data transfer rate of all the source nodes (leaf nodes) to avoid congestion at the intermediate nodes. NGECC considers both the channel occupation and the buffer overflow as the main factors of the packet loss in the network. For the simulation of the NGECC method, we use Contiki OS and Cooja simulator, which operates based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard and implements the 6LoWPAN protocol stack. The performance of NGECC has been evaluated by comparing it with the analytical results, the default routing protocol for low-power and lossy network functioning, and two other existing methods. The simulation results show that the NGECC outperforms the existing methods in terms of sending rate of data packets, packet delivery ratio, throughput, weighted fairness index, energy consumption, and delay.