Effects of the Acknowledgment Traffic on the Capacity of Wireless Mesh Networks

Since the emergence of ubiquitous computing, evaluating wireless network performances has become one of the major economic issues. Among the existing performance indicators, the network capacity, defined as the maximal amount of flow carried by a topology during a fixed time period, is essential. Some cross-layer characteristics have to be taken into account in order to optimally allocate the common resources. In this article, a comparative study is done between interference consequences in the two following models: (i) usual IEEE 802.11 MAC layer with acknowledgments at each hop, and (ii) block acknowledgments reported at the transport layer that can be included in the IEEE 802.16 standard. Cross-layer properties are modeled in a linear programming formulation that is solved using the column generation process. We quantify the gain in capacity induced by the move of the MAC acknowledgments into the transport layer, and show the better load distribution obtained in the network with the second model.