Hop-by-Hop Congestion Control for Wireless Mesh Networks with Multi-Channel MAC

The integration of Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) with other networks (e.g. Internet, cellular, IEEE 802.11, sensor networks, etc.) requires an effective and robust congestion control algorithm to maintain network stability and achieve a high network resource utilization. In this paper, we address the problem of congestion control for WMNs with multi-channel MAC. We formulate the design of congestion control mechanism in such a system as a optimization problem of utilization maximization subject to time constraint. We first derive an end-to-end algorithm as the solution. Based on that, we develop a distributed adaptive algorithm with hop-by-hop congestion information feedback and prove its convergence. The numerical results based on ns-2 simulations validate the stability and demonstrate that the hop-by-hop congestion control algorithm significantly outperforms the end-to-end algorithm in terms of queue length.