Privileging long-life packets in multihop wireless networks

The typical application of wireless mesh networks is Internet access. This application introduces a gateway, which becomes the preferred destination in the network. In such topology, the throughput share is unfair because the number of medium accesses increases with the distance to the gateway. In this work, we propose the route-length-based fairness (RLF) mechanism to assign a higher priority on medium access for packets that traverse a high number of hops, named long-life packets. When comparing the proposed mechanism to IEEE 802.11g, the simulation results show a considerable improvement in fairness for applications running over UDP and TCP.