Using priority queuing for congestion control in IoT-based technologies for IoT applications

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) connect millions of devices in diverse areas such as smart cities, e-health, transportation and defense to meet a wide range of human needs. To provide these services, a large amount of data needs to be transmitted to the IoT network servers. However, the IoT networks suffer from limited resources such as buffer size, node processing capabilities, and server capacities adversely affecting throughputs, latency, and energy consumption. Additionally, the ensuing heavy network traffic due to large amount of data transmitted results in congestion which degrades IoT network performance. Therefore, innovative congestion control techniques, e.g., queue management approach needs to be developed to overcome congestion problems in IoT networks. In this paper, a novel priority queuing technique (Npqt++) is developed to control congestion in IoT networks. The Npqt++ implements a preemptive/nonpreemptive discipline with a discretion rule to classify network traffic based on their real-time requirement into priority groups. If the discretion rule for low priority packets is satisfied, high priority packets are pushed to the front of the queue; otherwise, they wait in the queue. Our approach significantly outperforms existing techniques in terms of throughput, delay, and energy consumption.