A Traffic Redirection Based Congestion Control Scheme in Body Area Networks

Abstract

Growing data traffic generated by several sources in a Body Area Network (BAN) leads to congestion. One of the major challenges in BANs is congestion alleviation. Congestion causes packet drops which leads to lower network performance and higher delay due to packet retransmission. In this study, a novel traffic redirection based congestion control scheme is proposed in BANs. In the proposed scheme, when a sensor node is congested, its neighboring nodes select new next hop node. New next hop node selection is based on the queue size and hop counts to the sink of the neighboring nodes. Simulation results show that our protocol provides significant improvement in packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay compared with the existing protocol.