Congestion control and service differentiation in multihop wireless networks

This paper describes a practical algorithm for congestion control and service differentiation in multihop wireless networks using CSMA/CA type MAC protocol. The algorithm is designed by taking into account the implementation issues of distributed contention based transmission protocols without a central controller. The proposed algorithm computes a weighted load metric related to the queue status of the nodes to provide a distributed and stateless traffic control mechanism. Service differentiation is achieved through intranode and internode scheduling. Fairness is provided in terms of fair sharing both channels and next hops (Le. forwarding nodes). Performance evaluation in both laboratory and live networks is used to optimize the algorithm.