LCART: A Cross-layered Transport Protocol for Heterogeneous WSN

Abstract

Lightweight Congestion Aware Reliable Transport protocol (LCART) is based on cross-layering the prevalent or reciprocal functionalities of Transport, MAC and Wireless-Physical layers in order to achieve energy efficiency and meeting QoS objectives of heterogeneous WSN1 including multimedia. LCART intelligently overcomes network congestion by the simultaneous use of Packet Service Time, Packet Inter Arrival Time, Buffer Occupancy Level and Channel Loading threshold limits and ensures packet level reliability by the use of β parameter entirely being dictated by the nature of traffic flow. LCART has been evaluated against TCP-Westwood+ (TCP-WW+), TCPWestwood (TCP-WW), TCPNewReno and TCPReno for 24 mote ad-hoc topology. The results reveal that LCART outperforms others by exhibiting highest good throughput of 0.3112 Mbps, average End to-End (E-2-E) packet latency of <; 80 msec for multimedia and <; 130 msec for scalar information, 1.014% average percentage packet drop and overall exhibits energy efficient behavior.