Navigating Congestion in Wireless Sensor Network: A Comprehensive Survey

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is widely used in numerous applications, like environmental monitoring, industrial automation, and healthcare. The deployment of resource constraint numerous sensors in wireless sensor networks often results in congestion issues, which significantly impact both data transmission efficiency and overall network performance hence addressing congestion is crucial to ensuring the proficient and reliable operation of these networks. This survey article serves as a concise overview of controlling congestion in WSNs. discussing the different types of WSNs and the challenges they face, which complicate the development of effective congestion management techniques. The paper reviews both traditional and soft-computing-based congestion control methods, emphasizing the advantages of learning techniques over conventional approaches. It surveys recent literature on soft computing-based congestion control, categorizing techniques into Reactive- routing-based algorithms, transmission rate-based control, hybrid methods combining rate and routing, and Proactive- congestion avoidance approaches. Furthermore, the paper discusses the metrics used for evaluating the performance of these congestion control techniques and highlights their effectiveness. The survey concludes by identifying open research issues in controlling congestion in WSNs and suggesting potential directions for future research.