Measurement and modeling of the origins of starvation of congestion-controlled flows in wireless mesh networks

Authors:
Omer Gurewitz;Vincenzo Mancuso;Jingpu Shi;Edward W. Knightly
Affiliations:
Department of Communication Systems Engineering, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beer Sheva, Israel;Department of Electrical, Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering, Università di Palermo, Palermo, Italy;Quantlab Financial LLC, Houston, TX and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University, Houston, TX;Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Rice University, Houston, TX
Venue:
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Year:
2009

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Abstract

Significant progress has been made in understanding the behavior of TCP and congestion-controlled traffic over CSMA-based multihop wireless networks. Despite these advances, however, no prior work identified severe throughput imbalances in the basic scenario of mesh networks, in which a one-hop flow contends with a two-hop flow for gateway access. In this paper, we demonstrate via real network measurements, testbed experiments, and an analytical model that starvation exists in such a scenario; i.e., the one-hop flow receives most of the bandwidth, while the two-hop flow starves. Our analytical model yields a solution consisting of a simple contention window policy that can be implemented via standard mechanisms defined in IEEE 802.11e. Despite its simplicity, we demonstrate through analysis, experiments, and simulations that the policy has a powerful effect on network-wide behavior, shifting the network's queuing points, mitigating problematic MAC and transport behavior, and ensuring that TCP flows obtain a fair share of the gateway bandwidth, irrespective of their spatial location.