Adopting Multi-radio Channel Approach in TCP Congestion Control Mechanisms to Mitigate Starvation in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have the potential to deliver Internet broadband access, resource sharing, wireless local area network coverage and network connectivity for stationary or mobile hosts at low cost. With the increasing number of spontaneously deployed Wi-Fi hotspots and community-based networks, end users often experience performance degradation due to starvation. The starvation is the frequently encountered problem in wireless mesh networks where in nodes which are close to the gateway always block the channel without giving a chance to the faraway nodes to transmit data. TCP-flow assist congestion control mechanisms were defined and devised to avoid congestion in the network traffic and do not account and guarantee the fairness. It had been proved that the multi-radio multi-channel approach in wireless mesh networks improves the capacity. In this paper, we propose a framework in which we adopt multi-channels in TCP congestion control mechanisms to mitigate starvation and guarantee the fairness for all nodes in the network. An optimal channel assignment algorithm is proposed and incorporated in our framework. The QoS performance of our proposed frame work is compared with existing methods.