Joint routing and per-flow fairness in wireless multihop networks

In wireless multihop networks communication between two end-nodes is carried out by hopping over multiple short wireless links. Traditional CSMA/CA based media access control does not work satisfactory in a multihop scenario, since an intended target of a communication may be subject to mutual interference imposed by concurrent transmissions from nodes which cannot directly sense each other, causing unfair throughput allocation. Although TDMA seems to be a more promising solution, careful transmission scheduling is needed in order to achieve error-free communication and fairness. In our previous work, a TDMA scheduling algorithm has been proposed that schedules the transmissions in a fair manner and takes into account the communication requirements of the active flows of the network. In this paper, in order to further improve this scheme, we combine the TDMA scheduling algorithm with two different load-balancing algorithms. Simulation results showed that the proposed load-balancing policies can further improve the performance of the TDMA scheduling algorithm.