Performance of TCP, UDP and SCTP on Sensor Network with Different Data Reporting Intervals

The performance of the congestion control algorithms of most of the reliable transport protocol of internet, particularly wireless networks and mobile ad-hoc networks, are not satisfactory under a high density sensor network applications, since they are designed mainly for wired networks and not for sensor networks.In this work, we evaluate the performance of some of the popular transport protocols on a congested sensor network scenario.The transport protocols considered for evaluation are Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), User Datagram Protocol (UDP) and Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP).The implementation and the evaluation of these selected protocols in the sensor network is done using Network Simulator (NS2).The performance of these algorithms were measured and analyzed using suitable metrics such as throughput, End-to-End delay, Energy consumption etc..The average performance of the networks is found to be the best in the UDP algorithm based networks, with respect to the five metrics considered in this work.It is also found that TCP provides highest throughput at higher data rate, at long data reporting intervals.