Achieving Congestion Diversity in Multi-hop Wireless Mesh Networks

TL;DR

This study systematically compares congestion-aware routing algorithms in wireless mesh networks, demonstrating that the Congestion Diversity Protocol (CDP) significantly improves delay and throughput under medium to high load conditions.

Contribution

The paper introduces and empirically evaluates a new congestion-aware routing protocol, CDP, tailored for 802.11 mesh networks, showing its advantages over existing protocols.

Findings

CDP outperforms other protocols in delay and throughput under load

Backpressure-based algorithms perform poorly for UDP and TCP

Modular routing design preserves MAC layer performance

Abstract

This paper reports on the first systematic study of congestion-aware routing algorithms for wireless mesh networks to achieve an improved end-end delay performance. In particular, we compare 802.11 compatible implementations of a set of congestion-aware routing protocols against our implementation of state of the art shortest path routing protocol (SRCR). We implement congestion-aware routing algorithms Backpressure (BP), Enhanced-Backpressure (E-BP) adapted from [1], [2] suitably adjusted for 802.11 implementation. We then propose and implement Congestion Diversity Protocol (CDP) adapted from [3] recognizing the limitations of BP and E-BP for 802.11-based wireless networks. SRCR solely utilizes link qualities, while BP relies on queue differential to route packets. CDP and E-BP rely on distance metrics which take into account queue backlogs and link qualities in the network. E-BP computes its metric by summing the ETX and queue differential, while CDP determines its metric by calculating the least draining time to the destination. Our small testbed consisting of twelve 802.11g nodes enables us to empirically compare the performance of congestion-aware routing protocols (BP, E-BP and CDP) against benchmark SRCR. For medium to high load UDP traffic, we observe that CDP exhibits significant improvement with respect to both end-end delay and throughput over other protocols with no loss of performance for TCP traffic. Backpressure-based routing algorithms (BP and E-BP) show poorer performance for UDP and TCP traffic. Finally, we carefully study the effects of the modular approach to congestion-aware routing design in which the MAC layer is left intact