An Energy-efficient Congestion Control Scheme for MPTCP in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Bao Nguyen Trinh, Liam Murphy, Gabriel-Miro Muntean

Abstract: Providing support for energy efficiency and Quality of Service (QoS) is among the major challenges when designing solutions for video delivery over Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSN). As video applications have high bitrate delivery requirements, an effective way is to enable the sensor nodes to transmit data over multiple paths in parallel, for instance by employing Multi-path TCP (MPTCP). However, in a dense network like WMSN, high traffic volume transmission may cause congestion, affecting all paths. In such a case, congestion control algorithms play a key role in order to support high QoS levels, including by employing retransmissions of lost data. However, data retransmissions result in energy consumption increases, which is an aspect of concern for WMSN services. In this paper, we propose eqCCMP, an energy-efficient congestion control scheme for MPTCP. The general idea of eqCCMP is to use low energy consumption paths to deliver data, while making sure good QoS levels are maintained. A fluid model is employed to formulate the operation of eqCCMP. The performance of eqCCMP is evaluated in comparison with other schemes including the vanilla MPTCP and ecMTCP. By considering an extra factor in the congestion avoidance phase for congestion window adjustment, the proposed eqCCMP outperforms the other solutions in terms of throughput and energy efficiency in a simulation environment.