An Adaptive Rate Allocation System to Mitigate Starvation Dilemma in Multi-Radio Multi-Hop Wireless Mesh Networks

To this date, although a rich surge of research studies have been conducted on Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs), still impartial distribution of network resources is one of the open issues in this area. In WMNs, stations that are more hops away from the gateway nodes generally suffer from higher throughput degradation and delay. One of the key reasons for the occurrence of such an incident is the existing limitations in MAC layers of wireless technologies. In this paper, a thorough solution based on an adaptive rate allocation mechanism is proposed to alleviate the fairness issues of WMNs. It is important to note that the presented solution is independent from MAC and underlying layers. This property differentiates it from many other related works on addressing fairness problems in WMNs. Furthermore, the ability of traffic control over UDP and TCP streams, supporting multi-radio mesh routers and restriction of internal greedy traffic within WMNs can be regarded as the main advantages of the offered solution in comparison to the earlier related works. For assessment and evaluation of the proposed scheme, several experiments have been carried out through real testbed environment. The consistency of the represented results substantiates the efficiency of the proposed mechanism in terms of addressing starvation issues and fairness provisioning for end-users of WMNs.