End-to-End Fair Bandwidth Allocation in Multi-Hop Wireless Ad Hoc Networks

The shared-medium multi-hop nature of wireless ad hoc networks poses fundamental challenges to the design of an effective resource allocation algorithm to maximize spatial reuse of spectrum, while maintaining basic fairness among multiple flows. When previously proposed scheduling algorithms have been shown to perform well in providing fair shares of bandwidth among single-hop wireless flows, they do not consider multi-hop flows with an end-to-end perspective when maximizing spatial reuse of spectrum. Instead, previous work attempts to break each multi-hop end-to-end flow into multiple single-hop flows for scheduling purposes. While this may be sufficient for maintaining basic fairness properties among single-hop subflows with respect to bandwidth, we show that, due to the intra-flow correlation between upstream and downstream hops, it may not be appropriate for maximizing spatial reuse of bandwidth. In this paper, we analyze the issue of increasing such spatial reuse of bandwidth from an end-to-end perspective of multi-hop flows. Through analysis and simulation results, we show that our proposed algorithm is able to appropriately distribute resources among multi-hop flows, so that end-to-end throughput may be maximized in wireless ad hoc networks, while still maintaining basic fairness across the multi-hop flows