Performance Analysis of Proposed Congestion Avoiding Protocol for IEEE 802.11s

The wireless technology is one of the core components of mobile applications with mobility support at low deployment costs. Among these, Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is one of the technologies that supports mobile users for un-disrupted, reliable data connectivity, provides high bandwidth even in areas, where access of such services is difficult. Additionally, it features capabilities like self-configuring, self-healing, and self-organizing. IEEE proposed a MAC standard for WMN enhancements named IEEE 802.11s for multi-hop networks. Within this standard, the mandatory routing protocol called Hybrid Wireless Mesh Protocol (HWMP) is proposed for efficient utilization of resources to achieve high bandwidth at MAC layer. To improve this protocol, a congestion avoiding protocol was proposed, which utilizes alternate paths just before the congestion state is reached. The proposed technique does not add any overhead, it utilizes congestion notification frame, which is already part of standard. This paper discusses simulation results of the proposed routing protocol against the existing HWMP protocol for packet delivery fraction, throughput and delay. The results indicate that the proposed technique significantly improves performance of IEEE 802.11s. Keywords—Wireless Mesh Network; IEEE802.11s; Congestion Control; Congestion Avoidance; Routing Protocol; HWMP