Improving Fairness and Throughput in Multi-Hop Wireless Networks

In this paper we study the impact of the medium access control (MAC) layer and the routing layer on the performance of a multi-hop wireless network. At the medium access control layer, we argue that the notion of per-node fairness employed by the IEEE 802.11 standard is not suitable for a multi-hop wireless network where flows traverse multiple hops. We propose a new MAC protocol that supports prioritized per-node fairness and significantly improves performance in terms of both throughput and fairness. At the routing layer, we show that load balanced routing improves performance regardless of the nature of the underlying MAC protocol. Moreover, we show that an ideal load balanced routing protocol should take into account both the hop counts and the capacities when computing the optimal path. We propose a new routing protocol that improves performance over the conventional shortest-widest path routing.