On the goodput of flows in heterogeneous mobile networks

Abstract

In practice heterogeneous networks comprising of diverse nodes need to operate efficiently under a wide range of node mobility and link quality regimes. In this paper, we propose algorithms to determine the goodput of flows in heterogeneous mobile networks. We consider a scenario where some network nodes operate as routers while others operate as flooders, based on the underlying forwarding policy. When a node operates as a router, it forwards packets based on the routing table as determined by the underlying routing algorithm and when it operates as a flooder, it broadcasts packets to all its neighbors. We begin with the case of a single network flow and demonstrate that the problem of determining the goodput is challenging even for this simple setting. We construct a Bayesian network, and propose an algorithm based on the sum-product algorithm to determine the exact goodput. We extend the proposed Bayesian network model for exact goodput calculation to feed forward networks with multiple flows. For a general network with multiple flows, the problem becomes more challenging. The difficulty of the problem stems from the fact that node pairs can forward traffic to one another, resulting in cyclical dependencies. We propose a fixed-point approximation to determine the goodput in this case. Finally, we present an application scenario, where we leverage the fixed-point approximation to design a forwarding strategy adaptive-flood that adapts seamlessly to varying networking conditions. We perform simulations and show that adaptive-flood can effectively classify individual nodes as routers/flooders, achieving performance equivalent to, and in some cases significantly better than that of network-wide routing or flooding alone.