Distributed Flow Control and Medium Access in Multihop Ad Hoc Networks

Recent studies have shown that the performance of wireless multihop ad hoc networks is very poor. In this paper, we first demonstrate that one important reason of the poor performance is the close coupling between medium contention and network congestion. Therefore, we present a framework of distributed flow control and medium access control to address both medium contention and network congestion. The proposed scheme utilizes the MAC layer control frames to efficiently conduct the network layer's flow control function and only allows the upstream nodes to forward enough packets to make it possible for the downstream nodes to fully utilize the shared channel but never introduce severe MAC collisions and network congestion. Extensive simulations illustrate that the proposed scheme well controls congestion and greatly alleviates medium collisions. It achieves up to 12 times the end-to-end throughput of IEEE 802.11, maintains a short delay and a low control overhead, and improves the fairness regardless of the hop count and the traffic load