In wireless sensor networks (WSNs), the communication radius of a single sensor node is constrained. Thus, many-to-one and multi-hop routing protocols are designed to relay collected data back to the sink node. One of the challenges handled by present routing protocols is to prevent or reduce traffic congestion, which inevitably causes high packet drop rate, low energy efficiency, and long end-to-end delay. This paper presents an enhanced data collection protocol based on the Collection Tree

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... tocol (CTP), which introduces the concept of congestion detection and congestion avoidance into CTP. We have implemented test-bed experiments containing 10 TelosB motes, and compared results of our ECTP with the original CTP protocol and also with another enhanced CTP which takes the main mechanisms of ECODA. According to the experimental results, our ECTP improves the efficiency and performance of data collection tasks in WSN compared to the other two.