Abstract: Wireless sensor networks congestion often leads to increasing network latency, decreasing throughput and wasting the limited sensor node energy. In this paper, an energy-efficient congestion control scheme, which can alleviate congestion in wireless sensor networks, is proposed. The scheme includes hop-by-hop congestion message feedback and rate adjustment. Node periodically samples its queue occupancy and the packet rates of its upstream neighbors, and infers whether congestion will occur in the current time interval. Upon receiving the congestion feedback, these upstream nodes decrease their rate according to their local queue occupancies. Furthermore, sink adjusts the source rate related to some event which is beyond or below the application fidelity. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme is more effective and energy-efficient in congestion alleviation than CODA.