Making WiFi Work in Multi-hop Topologies: Automatic Negotiation and Allocation of Airtime

We propose a solution for mitigating the performance impairments of CSMA/CA protocols in multi-hop topologies based on the dynamic adaptation of the contention process experienced by nodes in a wireless network. A distributed protocol is used to negotiate the channel airtime for a node as a function of the traffic requirements of its neighbourhood, taking into account bandwidth reserved for the control operations. A mechanism is provided for a node to tune its contention window depending on its allocated airtime. Different from previous schemes, a node´s contention window is fixed in size unless the traffic requirements of its neighbourhood change. The scheme is implemented on legacy commercial 802.11 devices. Extensive experimental results, performed on the CREW European testbed, demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.