Congestion Aware Scheduling Algorithm for MANET

In the mobile ad hoc networks (MANET), many characteristics, such as the multi-hop transmission of packets, high dynamic topology and the limited bandwidth, make the network performance very poor. Typically, packet schedulers in MANET give priority to routing packets over data packets and serve data packets in FIFO order. We find that the simple scheduling scheme performs poorly when the network is congested. This paper proposes a congestion aware scheduling algorithm (CARE) targeting to improve the performance of MANET. In the proposed scheduling scheme, a node takes into consideration the traffic load of its neighbors when deciding the passing flows´ scheduling priority. All the incoming flows are first classified by the next hop address, then the scheduler sets their priority based on the rank of the neighbors´ load. We study the performance of CARE through simulation experiments, and the results show that our scheduling scheme exhibits a significant performance improvement, compared to simple priority and drop-tail algorithm