A Distributed Algorithm for Throughput Optimization With Fairness in Wireless Mesh Networks

In IEEE 802.11-based multi-hop Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), nodes that are a number of hops away from the GateWay (GW) face two-fold contentions: namely channel access contention between itself and other nodes, and traffic contention between its own and relayed traffic. As a result, they suffer from low throughput and even starvation, which results in unfairness in transmissions. In this paper, the authors develop a rate control mechanism that can flexibly coordinate the tradeoff between throughput and fairness to adapt to different application scenarios by combining a rate adaptation algorithm, an adaptive capacity estimation algorithm and a queue management scheme.