A survey of end-to-end congestion mechanisms in the field of IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a global network of devices capable of communicating and exchanging data with other devices and systems, mainly via the Internet, using specific communication protocols. The number of such devices that can be connected to the Internet is constantly growing due to progress in various technological areas (such as communication technologies, microelectronic circuits, sensors, embedded systems, smartphones, etc.). This leads to network congestion due to the large amount of data exchanged between devices. In addition, IoT devices are resource-constrained, further exacerbating network congestion. Network congestion leads to additional communication delays, low bandwidth, and waste of computer resources. This is one of the important aspects when some IoT applications exchange critical information (e.g., monitoring the patient’s health condition in the application of IoT in smart healthcare). As the number of IoT applications increases, so does the need to modify or introduce new protocols to deal with the problems of adapting to network conditions. In the IoT layered architecture, the transport layer plays an important role in managing the end-to-end connection to the services of the upper application IoT layer. An important function of the transmission layer of the IoT layer is congestion control. This paper presents an overview of related research on the congestion control mechanism of the IoT architecture’s transport layer, advantages, disadvantages, and current transport layer problems in IoT applications.