This paper proposes that the flocking behavior of birds can guide the design of a robust, scalableand self-adaptive congestion control protocol in the context of wireless sensor networks (WSNs).The proposed approach adopts a swarm intelligence paradigm inspired by the collective behaviorof bird flocks. The main idea is to ‘guide’ packets (birds) to form flocks and flow towards thesink (global attractor), whilst trying to avoid congestion regions (obstacles). The direction ofmotion of a packet flock is influenced by repulsion and attraction forces between packets, as wellas the field of view and the artificial magnetic field in the direction of the artificial magnetic pole(sink). The proposed approach is simple to implement at the individual node, involving minimalinformation exchange. In addition, it displays global self-* properties and emergent behavior,achieved collectively without explicitly programming these properties into individual packets.Performance evaluations show the effectiveness of the proposed Flock-based Congestion Control(Flock-CC) mechanism in dynamically balancing the offered load by effectively exploitingavailable network resources and moving packets to the sink. Furthermore, Flock-CC providesgraceful performance degradation in terms of packet delivery ratio, packet loss, delay and energytax under low, high and extreme traffic loads. In addition, the proposed approach achievesrobustness against failing nodes, scalability in different network sizes and outperforms typicalconventional approaches.
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