TITLE:
COCM: Class Based Optimized Congestion Management Protocol for Healthcare Wireless Sensor Networks
AUTHORS:
Abbas Ali Rezaee, Mohammad Hossein Yaghmaee, Amir Masoud Rahmani
KEYWORDS:
Wireless Sensor Networks; Active Queue Management; Congestion Control; Healthcare; Multi Path Routing
JOURNAL NAME:
Wireless Sensor Network,
Vol.5 No.7,
July
11,
2013
ABSTRACT: Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of
numerous sensor nodes which can be used in many new emerging applications
like healthcare. One of the major challenges in healthcare environments is to
manage congestion, because in applications, such as medical emergencies or
patients remote monitoring, transmitted data is important and critical. So it
is essential in the first place to avoid congestion as much as possible and in
cases when congestion avoidance is not possible, to control the congestion. In this
paper, a class based congestion management protocol has been proposed for
healthcare applications. We distinguish between sensitive, non-sensitive and
control traffics, and service the input traffics
based on their priority and quality of service requirements (QoS). The proposed
protocol which is called COCM avoids congestion in the first step using
multipath routing. The proposed AQM algorithm uses separate virtual queue's
condition on a single physical queue to accept or drop the incoming packets. In
cases where input traffic rate increases and congestion cannot be avoided, it
mitigates congestion by using an optimized congestion control algorithm. This
paper deals with parameters like end to end delay, packet loss, energy
consumption, lifetime and fairness which are important in healthcare
applications. The performance of COCM was evaluated using the OPNET simulator.
Simulation results indicated that COCM achieves its goals.