AR-TP: An Adaptive and Responsive Transport Protocol for Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless meshing has been envisioned as the economically viable networking paradigm to build up broadband and large-scale wireless commodity networks. Several different mesh network architectures have been conceived by both industry and academia; however many issues on the deployment of efficient and fair transport protocols are still open. In this paper, an adaptive and responsive transport protocol (AR- TP) is proposed for WMNs in order to fairly allocate the network resources among multiple flows, while minimizing the performance overhead. Compared to the classical end-to-end rate control mechanisms, an hop-by-hop congestion control approach is designed to keep track of dynamic multi-hop network characteristics in a responsive manner. In addition, a coarse-grained end-to-end reliability algorithm is integrated with the proposed hop-by-hop congestion control mechanism to provide packet level reliability at the transport layer. Performance evaluation via extensive simulation experiments show that the AR-TP protocol achieves high performance in terms of network throughput and fairness.