Elastic Rate Limiting for Spatially Biased Wireless Mesh Networks

—IEEE 802.11-based mesh networks can yield a throughput distribution among nodes that is spatially biased, with traffic originating from nodes that directly communicate with the gateway obtaining higher throughput than all other upstream traffic. In particular, if single-hop nodes fully utilize the gateway’s resources, all other nodes communicating with the same gateway will attain very little (if any) throughput. In this paper, we show that it is sufficient to rate limit the single-hop nodes in order to give transmission opportunities to all other nodes. Based on this observation, we develop a new rate limiting scheme for 802.11 mesh networks, which counters the spatial bias effect and does not require, in principle, any control overhead. Our rate control mechanism is based on three key techniques. First, we exploit the system’s inherent priority nature and control the throughput of the spatially disadvantaged nodes by only controlling the transmission rate of the spatially a...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Vincenzo Mancuso, Omer Gurewitz, Ahmed Khattab, Edward W. Knightly
• Keywords: Communications, Disadvantaged Nodes, Gateway Resources, INFOCOM 2010, Single-hop Nodes