Proactive Bandwidth Estimation for IEEE 802.15.4-Based Networks

Estimating the available bandwidth in IEEE 802.15.4-based networks is a difficult and challenging task due to the shared nature of the wireless communication medium. The MAC layer decides the sharing of a communication medium, therefore the MAC layer dictates the amount of bandwidth available to a node. Some recent solutions consider the impact of the MAC layer back-off due to collision and transmitter and receiver non-synchronization on the available bandwidth, Available Bandwidth Estimation (ABE) is one such example. None of the existing solutions pro-actively consider the impact of additional overhead of an unslotted Carrier Sense Multiple Access Collision Avoidance (CSMA-CA) protocol with an increased data load inside a network on the available bandwidth. Therefore the amount of reported available bandwidth is not fully available to a node, hence this can result in poor admission decisions. In this paper, we show that increasing data load inside the IEEE 802.15.4-based network increases MAC layer overhead. Afterwards, we enhance the ABE bandwidth estimation and admission control algorithms so that they pro-actively consider the additional MAC layer overhead associated with an increased data load inside a network. We performed a number of simulations, and our simulation results show that the proposed proactive ABE method performs better than the original ABE method.