Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Address Network Congestion Challenges in IoT Systems

Abstract

The explosion of Internet of things (IoT) devices has led to pretty much saturated network infrastructures, thus congestion often becomes severe, especially in applications where users require low latency, high throughput and real-time responses. Hence, traditional congestion control mechanisms like static routing protocols, Active Queue Management (AQM) and TCP variants are not suitable for this dynamic and heterogeneous IoT environment as they are reactive, rigid and cannot adapt to dynamic changes. The contribution is to investigate the potential of AI paradigms—such as ML, DL, RL and hybrid models- to provide Intelligent and proactive congestion Control in IoT systems. The paper compares the strengths and weaknesses of each method, such as RL’s generalizability and DL’s ability to capture patterns, as well as limitations in terms of scalability, interpretability, and computational resource requirements. Moreover, it emphasizes important research gaps in model generalization process, evaluation criteria and cross-platform fusion. Next steps in research discussions on the future of research take into account lightweight AI architectures, Explainable AI (XAI) frameworks, scalability of FL, and standard benchmarking data sets. The hybrid-AI congestion prediction model built in this work is validated across simulation tools and real-data sets and is observed to result in a significant decrease in latency, packet loss and energy consumption. This paper paves the way for scalable, intelligent and secure AI-based congestion management solutions for various IoT networks.