Novel Techniques for Fair Rate Control in Wireless Mesh Networks

IEEE 802.11 based wireless mesh networks can exhibit severe fairness problem by distributing throughput among different flows originated from different nodes. Congestion control, Throughput, Fairness are the important factors to be considered in any wireless network. Flows originating from nodes that directly communicate with the gateway get higher throughput. On the other hand, flows originating from two or more hops away get very little throughput. For this reason a distributed fair scheduling is an ideal candidate for fair utilization of gateway’s resources (i.e., bandwidth, airtime) and thereby achieving fairness among contending flows in WMNs. There are numerous solution for aforementioned factors in wireless mesh network. We figured out some problems of few existing solutions and integrated to give the solution for those problems. We considered neighborhood phenomenon, airtime allocation and elastic rate control to design a novel technique to achieve fair rate control in wireless mesh network. And finally we introduce distributed fair scheduling to get fairness in mesh network. Keywords-Wireless mesh network; Network Throughput; Congestion Control; Fairness; Airtime Allocation; Neighbourhood Phenomenon; Gateway. (key words)