Investment Function: Enhanced Fairness and Performance in Multi-hop Wireless Networks

In multi-hop wireless networks, longer-hop UDP and especially TCP flows receive a smaller fraction of the available bandwidth than single-hop flows in the absence of specific resource allocation techniques. Also, inter-node interference effects in multi-hop networks lead to incredibly poor bandwidth utilization. This paper begins to address these and other related issues through the novel concept of an investment function which captures the investments (network resources consumed, price paid for service quality, etc.) that are made in packet flows. The investment value of packets or packet flows can then be used to control their treatment in the network, with the goal of providing fair and efficient utilization of network resources through minimizing wasted investment and/or maximizing investment throughput. We show that a simple investment function can significantly improve flow fairness by smoothing out the disparities in distribution of bandwidth among flows with different hop length while simultaneously improving bandwidth utilization efficiency