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DISTRIBUTED SOURCE RATE LIMITING MECHANISM FOR WIRELESS MESH NETWORK

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) built with commodity 802.11 radios are a cost-effective means of providing last mile broadband Internet access. Their multi-hop architecture allows for rapid deployment and organic growth of these networks. In this paper we focus on fair rate allocation requirements. Our approach does not require any changes to individual mesh routers. Further, it uses existing data traffic as capacity probes, thus incurring a zero control traffic overhead. We propose the mechanism based on this approach on aggregate rate control (ARC). ARC limits the aggregate capacity of a network to the sum of fair rates for a given set of flows. We show that the resulting rate allocation achieved approximately max-min fair. We show how it can be used to achieve weighted flow rate fairness. Our comparative analysis show that our mechanisms improve fairness indices when compared with networks without any rate limiting, and are approximately equivalent to results achieved with distributed source rate limiting mechanisms that require software modifications on all mesh routers.

Navdeep Saluja and Rajesh Shrivastava

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