Fluid-flow modeling of a relay node in an IEEE 802.11 wireless ad-hoc network

  • Authors:

  • Frank Roijers;Hans Van Den Berg;Michel Mandjes

  • Affiliations:

  • TNO Information and Communication Technology, The Netherlands and Korteweg-de Vries Institute, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, The Netherl ...;TNO Information and Communication Technology, The Netherlands and Department of Design and Analysis of Communication Systems, University of Twente, The Netherlands;Korteweg-de Vries Institute, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • ITC20'07 Proceedings of the 20th international teletraffic conference on Managing traffic performance in converged networks
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Wireless ad-hoc networks are based on shared medium technology where the nodes arrange access to the medium in a distributed way independent of their current traffic demand. This has the inherent drawback that a node that serves as a relay node for transmissions of multiple neighboring nodes is prone to become a performance "bottleneck". In the present paper such a bottleneck node is modeled via an idealized fluid-flow queueing model in which the complex packet-level behavior (MAC) is represented by a small set of parameters. We extensively validate the model by ad-hoc network simulations that include all the details of the widely used IEEE 802.11 MAC-protocol. Further we show that the overall flow transfer time of a multi-hop flow, which consists of the sum of the delays at the individual nodes, improves by granting a larger share of the medium capacity to the bottleneck node. Such alternative resource sharing strategies can be enforced in real systems by deploying the recently standardized IEEE 802.11E MAC-protocol. We propose a mapping between the parameter settings of IEEE 802.11E and the fluid-flow model, and validate the fluid-flow model and the parameter mapping with detailed system simulations.