Congestion Control for 6LoWPAN Networks: A Game Theoretic Framework

Abstract

Abstract-The Internet of Things (IoT) has been considered as an emerging research area where the 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Network) protocol stack is considered as one of the most important protocol suite for the IoT. Recently, the Internet Engineering Task Force has developed a set of IPv6 based protocols to alleviate the challenges of connecting resource limited (i.e. power supply, processing and memory) sensor nodes to the Internet. In 6LoWPAN networks, heavy network traffic causes congestion which significantly degrades network performance and effects the quality of service (QoS) aspects e.g. throughput, end-to-end delay and energy consumption. In this paper, we formulate the congestion problem as a noncooperative game framework where the nodes (players) behave uncooperatively and demand high data rate in a selfish way. Then, the existence and uniqueness of Nash equilibrium is proved and the optimal game solution is computed by using Lagrange multipliers and KKT conditions. Based on this framework, we propose a novel and simple congestion control mechanism called game theory based congestion control framework (GTCCF) specially tailored for IEEE 802.15.4, 6LoWPAN networks. GTCCF is aware of node priorities and application priorities to support the IoT application requirements. The proposed framework has been tested and evaluated through two different scenarios by using Contiki OS and compared with comparative algorithms. Simulation results show that GTCCF improves performance in the presence of congestion by an overall average of 30.45%, 39.77%, 26.37%, 91.37% and 13.42% in terms of throughput, end-to-end delay, energy consumption, number of lost packets and weighted fairness index respectively as compared to DCCC6 algorithm.

Multihop Data Delivery Virtualization for Green Decentralized IoT

“…The core concept of [13] is based on an accurate estimation of round trip time. Al-Kashoash et al [14] have proposed GTCCF, a game theory-based congestion control framework for IEEE 802.15.4 networks. GTCCF takes into account node priorities and application priorities.…”

“…GTCCF takes into account node priorities and application priorities. These works [13,14] do not discuss the small congestion window size problem in multihop lossy networks.…”

“…There have been some studies discussing the transport layer design of multihop wireless networks [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. Most of the existing approaches [5][6][7][8][9] focus on improving the congestion control of TCP.…”

“…Since these protocols require modifications on TCP, the implementation difficulty is another problem. Some protocols have been proposed for specific IoT networks [10][11][12][13][14]. Depending on some specific protocols, these protocols lack generality.…”

“…Existing studies also cover the efficient use of wireless resources for the purpose of green IoT networking [15][16][17][18]. All the existing protocols [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] do not discuss the performance drop problem of end-to-end retransmission in a multihop distributed wireless IoT environment adequately. This paper focuses on efficient utilization of wireless resources in multihop wireless communications.…”