Improvement for Rate-Based Protocols in Multihop Wireless Networks

Transport layer performance in IEEE 802.11 multihop wireless networks (MHWNs) has been greatly challenged by wireless medium characteristics and multihop nature which induce several types of packet loss including collision, random channel errors and route failures. In this paper, we propose a novel rate control scheme, called Bi-Metric Rate Control (BMRC), which regulates efficiently the source rate in MHWNs. BMRC´s design is based on two MAC metrics: the Medium Access Delay used to detect the network contention level, and the Average Transmission Time used to estimate the effective packet sending rate by which the network will not be overloaded. The simulation results show that the adapted mechanism introduces significant performance improvement in terms of fairness, packet loss rate and delay in MHWNs.