Flow fairness using aggregate packet marking for wireless mesh networks

Wireless mesh networks have received considerable attention recently. If these networks were to reach their projected potential, some practical problems experienced in the first-generation deployments need to be addressed. One such problem is assuring that clients can share the (somewhat scarce) bandwidth fairly and that no client is forced to starve for bandwidth. We propose to make use of an aggregate packet marking approach that holds client flows in compliance with the established traffic parameters for the access network. As opposed to the other approaches which generally concentrate on scheduling and rate allocation mechanisms, our approach provides a simple yet viable mechanism that could be used by a queue management module (at an Internet Gateway for example) to discard out-of-profile packets. Our approach has the advantages of not requiring per-flow state, transport protocol independence as well as not requiring changes to the MAC protocol.